February 1, 2026

It’s a new month and my strategy for January to mostly rest I think was overall successful. I only finished one book the whole month, poked relentlessly at my journal compilation project, and dealt with endless frustration with both physical and mental health. It wasn’t a great month; not a loss, but last night I decided to pivot pretty hard. My whole thing going forward is I’m not forcing anything. 

I had a dream about being a card dealer (again) and as I laid here for an hour unsuccessfully trying to snooze, I thought about all the ups and downs. I keep saying I want to get back into cards, but the margin just wouldn’t be worth it to me at this point in my life. All the accusations of price gouging, scalping, and the risks of outright theft are just too high these days. Lose a binder with even low end cards and there goes your entire month of profit. I’m still going to enjoy some card related videos, but I see myself slipping back into the nostalgia of my card sales dabbling. 

I’m losing focus and intentionality, something I need to work on big time this year. It’s now 630, I’m just laying here in foggy indecision yet again. But one twelfth of the year is gone. I need to get my ass in gear.

…

Who ever thought a Barbie movie would have so much to say: 

Jordy’s channel is great. I need to watch more of it while I edit down the star wreck notes into something useful. I’ll be using Gemini to fill out the LTRS for January too at some point in the next few days, but not worry about including every day. That way I can also pull out other stuff for my future collection. Also I have those letters to my future self I wanted to do… maybe those points of interest I pull can be fuel for those?

…

Tipflation is so crazy, great Phil Edwards video:

My only issue with tipping is that certain occupations have their wages deflated by tips. But now it’s out of control with these tip screens. Behavioral economics is nuts.

…

I still ended up watching a lot of card related stuff… but specifically seeing how people run their various card businesses. So it was intentional. Also I watched the story of Bloo, who mega ultra cheated on the smogon tournaments, and while yeah what SHE did was wrong but the whole thing makes me so sad! Not saying what she did was right (it wasn’t) but it just shows how 10 years ago it was a boys club for real even in the pokemon world. Not so much now, fortunately.

February 2, 2026

Woke up before 6, so obviously I had no intentions of getting up. But you know that whole psychological thing of telling yourself not to do something, the more I tell myself I can’t get up, the more my head starts racing. I should get out of the house today, but I don’t really want to. I should tell myself I can’t work today, because that might make me productive. 

I was a soggy demotivated mess all day yesterday… got my head stuck in YouTube all day. The exact opposite of what I should be doing. And watching so much card related stuff… I’m feeling hopelessly defeated by my own brain, self sabotaging, crippled, balding mess.

I did snooze and had a bunch of mini allegorical nightmares. One was a comedy show that served a massive breakfast for dinner buffet that 98 percent I couldn’t eat. What else was new? The others just were people continuing to call me my old name and I had no idea who they were. Hell, do I even know who I am anymore? My self hatred is off the scale right now. I don’t even see the point of trying to pass for a girl anymore. I’ve given up trying to live up to even the most basic forms of social expectations. Why bother? I don’t think I’m doing anything at all for a while. My head is much too screwed up. To think this month may go even worse. And I can’t type for shit either… you don’t want to see all the typos I had to fix.

Fuck the Grammys that I forgot were happening. Sabrina didn’t win anything. Never giving a shit about those again. People are pretty pissed and well, duh. I mean Billie won one, I’m not sure for what, but I can’t be mad about that. Oh and Sabrina brought a bird on stage so now she’s cruel to animals… FFS!

What bothers me most isn’t just PETA clearly rage baiting for their own marketing purposes, but the fact people were mean to Sabrina in general. I think back to something Wolfey VGC said in his Emerald Kaizo streams once, when someone said his content was boring. Wolfe cited an underused feature of twitch known as watching something else or not watching it at all. He has a great point. It’s like people watched Sabrina’s performance just to be mad about it. It was adorable! Captain Sabrina of SC Airlines! So cute! Yes, it’s campy because that’s what she does best. Sure, not everyone is going to like it. People might see it as childish; people need to check their anger and shit at the door and just enjoy the spectacle. I know Sabrina is super sad at the massive negativity. She knows it’s all bullshit, but I’m sure it’s still extremely distressing. And people are coming to her defense, obviously, but this is the kind of thing that needs to stop…

It blows my mind how many people can replace their jobs and raise a family by buying and selling cardboard rectangles. Just nuts. I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing… but it kind of is. Whenever hobbies become big business, it just can get kind of icky… and there’s gonna be a huge crash soon – not so much in the low-end and higher-end vintage markets – but it’s gonna suck. The hobby will survive; it may ironically even flourish and bulk box sellers may actually do better hilariously enough. I WANT to see people succeed at running their own business instead of working a job they hate that isn’t paying enough to support their families. You know, raising kids is sorta important…

…

I slept for two hours, between noon and two, but not at all from fatigue. I’m actually, believe it or not, not nearly as fatigued as usual. I fell asleep because I was flat out depressed and being spiteful of the very being of consciousness. I don’t want to be conscious right now… Seeing Sabrina watch all her nominations just evaporate… how absolutely CRUSHED she was. Then to wake up today and have to face all this hate… Sabrina could’ve won at least ONE of the SIX. But this was a shut-out just like with Taylor… and plenty of people said that this was a tactic… give a super popular artist tons of noms and then shut them out for ratings… YUCK! 

Remember that they nominated Sabrina for Best New Artist LAST YEAR which made no sense. And Chappell deservingly won, and even SHE’S not a new artist, technically, although more so than Brina. So the whole set-up is a travesty. The fact that it’s just a sign that the culture has collectively lost its mind and is all just a mess is not surprising. It’s all just spectacle and marketing and a way to get Bad Bunny relevant right before the Super Bowl halftime show which will have millions of people worldwide tune in just for him. He’s very talented even if I’m not into Latin Rap. But none of this is about being inclusionary. It’s about people being racist, and by attempting to not be racist look arrogant and stupid in the process. Still, good for him. And he’s a huge Sabrina fan as it turns out!

I’m just allowing myself to suck today. We need days to just dedicate ourselves to sucking. I’m not even eating dinner. I’m in such a mood. Nothing is appealing at the moment.

…

Out of sheer boredom I checked the sublime app and found this:

“Creativity is the quality that you bring to the activity that you are doing. It is an attitude, an inner approach — how you look at things. Not everybody can be a painter — and there is no need also. If everybody is a painter the world will be very ugly; it will be difficult to live. And not everybody can be a dancer, and there is no need. But everybody can be creative. If whatsoever you do, if you do it joyfully, if you do it lovingly, your act of doing is not purely economical, then it is creative. If you have something growing out of it within you, if it gives you growth, it is spiritual, it is creative, it is divine. 

You become more divine as you become more creative. All the religions of the world have said God is the creator. I don’t know whether he is the creator or not, but one thing I know: the more creative you become, the more godly you become. When your creativity comes to a climax, when your whole life becomes creative, you live in God. So he must be the creator because people who have been creative have been closest to him. 

Love what you do. Be meditative while you are doing it — whatsoever it is! THE TRANSCENDENTAL GAME OF ZEN  ✦  9”

The quote came from the guide for a non-traditional tarot deck called Osho Zen Tarot. I don’t agree with every word here, but I do vibe with the gist of it. I do believe creativity is a divine act, but not necessarily an individual act as it is channeling something more universal that somehow has chosen you as its vessel. I’m not trying to sound woo-woo, and I think that this deck, while absolutely fascinating, when looking into what it has to say further it’s still a bit too hyper individualistic. 

That being said, we do have to work on ourselves, become better versions of ourselves through whatever sort of creativity flows through us. And when the flow is not there, as it hasn’t been for me recently, I can’t help but simply stop and take stock of my limited energies and shift my direction until I’m back into a flow state. I was thinking about this yesterday so this is an interesting thing to pop up in sublime, somewhat timely in its appearance among the app staff picks. Right now I haven’t been loving anything I’ve been doing. The energy to work on it isn’t there. I’m carrying around so much emotional, mental, and spiritual baggage. And I can’t seem to just let it all go. I’m just so angry. And I can’t let this continue… I need to find true joy again, and while I know it can find it in the bizarre fictions I want to write… the words just aren’t coming, and I refuse to force them. The flow state will come exactly when I least expect it… that’s how it always goes.

February 3, 2026

I did force myself to go to the store, just so I can have easy things to make and eat, especially in the mood that I’m in… Everything was fine until we stopped at a post office and a veteran got out of his car and screamed at us for being queer and almost backed into us on purpose! Suffice it to say we weren’t at the store very long. I was so pissed… never going to that post office when it’s busy again! The guy was going to hit Emily with an American legion car! Good thing I live parked… the world is so full of hate it’s literally sickening. I drove 60 miles an hour home to curl up and cry. 

I just watched YouTube all afternoon and played some Diablo immortal. Then I had my pizza when Emily left for New York and I found a really cool game called Endfield. It’s free to play and it has quite a neat setup. And I got a six star hero from an event already. Wow. The game was awesome until the base building part confused me and I got ultra pissed off! Gah why all this nonsense bullshit! Let me play the fucking game, FFS! I want to play a game, not be an effing civil engineer! The base building engineering bullshit is way too complicated… I don’t have the patience for this shit. I had to just give up on the game entirely. [It was required to progress in the story.] Four hours down the drain. The concept is fine but they make the puzzle part so brain fucking insane that it ruined it all! So I gave up. [And I went to bed very, very sad.]

February 4, 2026

I need to be much kinder to myself. I had a brutal night of dehydration and nightmares, to the degree where I wasn’t sure I’d get through the night. I felt like a rag doll at three in the morning. And as I’ve been laying here cursing at the sun for rising, I realize my problem is that writing has not been therapeutic lately. It’s become a burdening sort of work, forcing myself to get refocused on putting screaming thoughts into tangible language. 

Last night all I wanted to do was curse and scream. It’s not productive. It’s embarrassing and frankly a waste of energy. I need to make writing therapeutic again. I need to just shut the rest of the world out for a while. Just sitting with my notions and flights of fancy and learning to stop judging myself so harshly. 

I only got up because of the call of nature. I’m glad I stayed home. I’m in no mental, physical, or emotional condition to be able to commit to anything. But I can never just stop until my body tells me no. And it’s absolutely screaming no right now. 

I really don’t know why Emily wants this… she is my hero, and I suppose someone has to want this.  Emily brought up prestige international from stepbrothers and I said: That film is a perfect example of how the most patently absurd setup somehow works as a memorable sort of entertainment.

Seriously, I have to analyze everything to such an extreme.

I’m not sure what to do with myself. I’ve really lost the plot lately. But I think so many of us have. All I know is this: We are living right now in the present and it’s all we have. 

I was just realizing just how little I interact with music these days. I only really pay attention to Sabrina, Ariana, and Taylor. Really none else. I’ll watch some covers. That’s about it. I’m so out of the loop with all of it. And it seems everyone else is stuck on the songs of their youth. These days I only listen to whatever Emily is playing for the most part and that’s about it. I have my playlists but I rarely play them unless I’m in the car. I feel like streaming and the algorithms (especially Apple Music’s that refuses to shuffle properly) have ruined music almost entirely for me. I’m not vibing with much of anything. What is wrong with me? Why have I become so distant from music? What is it I even care about anymore?

I will say this: the pringles Love at First Bite commercial with Sabrina may be the greatest Super Bowl ad of all time. Greatest commercial is still the Southwest Airlines pink slip virus. And the yogi cash is just as good as money Aflac one. 

Jozette of ASMR Shortbread brought up the question of success on one of her older videos I was watching. I seriously had to ask myself… am I already successful? Do I even have to prove anything, even to myself? I’ve had a lot of time to ponder questions like this. 

I need to apologize to myself for being so ruthlessly aggressive with my expectations of life. I still need to heal from self inflicted wounds, not literal ones, but all these mean things I think and say about myself. But also I need to realize that if others want no part of me, this is nothing I brought upon myself. It is simply that I must stand apart until the right time. [Which came in July.]

February 5, 2026

I’ve been dealing with a lot of difficult emotions today. I needed yesterday as a sort of “rot day” to process what’s happened over the past year or so. Yes, I’ve made a lot of mistakes, and yet, just my very presence has changed things for the better in a number of lives, especially Emily’s. Not to self-aggrandize, but when I asked myself, what is success, last night… I think I already found it. It’s just that it’s not what I expected. I don’t have to lower my expectations to recognize it, only the shape and breadth of them has to change. 

I look at all the people that have had a positive effect on my life, and frankly, it’s a very small number. I like to think I’ve helped a lot more than I’ve hurt, and the hurt was unintentional… for the most part. I do still hold a lot of spite and anger towards those who disrespect me by refusing to acknowledge me for who I am. I need to simply let go of these heavy burdens. Easier said than done, of course. I may have to spend the rest of my life healing. No more “working” towards some imaginary goal, but simply tending to the garden of my thoughts, so overrun with brambles and weeds that it will likely take a team of landscape architects to assist me.

I can no longer live for the promise of an unwritten future revealing itself to me at some indeterminate date. I have to live for right now, because the present is a gift… sorry that cliche makes me want to throw up a bit, but I need to stop beating myself up. I have resources now beyond my wildest dreams and yet I don’t want to do anything at all. I feel like these are ill-gotten gains… they are not, of course, as they are completely legitimate and if people knew the hell we endured for five years to get here they wouldn’t be so quick to judge us so harshly. 

And we have tried to help people. Most of them are ungrateful. Now I’m extremely gunshy about even leaving a five dollar tip on a video… I still want to get back into cards, not for the money but for the community, for what that’s worth. Bring some happiness to the bleak days we are enduring. It’s all about intention, as I’ve said so many times before, but I can say that and still not have a particularly good intention for what I’m doing.

I feel like I need to force myself back out into the garden, but it’s been so bitterly cold. I’ve been using the weather outside as an excuse to hibernate. And I already spent a month doing that and I’m so restless I want to tear at myself just to feel something. I know that I’m far from alone in feeling this way. It’s why I let Emily go do things even when I’m not up to it… and I DID force myself out of the house Tuesday, only to witness someone who had it out for Emily… Fortunately there was someone there to stop that lunatic; but that’s not the point. People have just lost the plot entirely… not that life has a plot, really, to begin with. But we can have direction, we can have some guidelines for our journey. 

My journey has been extremely rough lately, mostly through self-inflicted wounds of self-hate and bad habits I’ve fallen back into. And sometimes we need to fall pretty hard in order to bounce back. I can’t say I’m on a bounce back, exactly, but the fact that I’m on the chrome book typing up these thoughts is a start. Maybe I can start properly digital gardening again. Even if I only have fifteen to twenty good minutes of work on Obscure Curiosities a day… that’s something. 

I don’t need to ask the opinion of an LLM if something is worthy of publishing… that’s how down I am on myself, that I don’t even have the judgment necessary to know if my own work is worthy of being alive again? 

I think my best bet is to trim the hedges of the existing content, make them live again, then move onto the journal deconstruction that was supposed to be my big task for the year. The work I did on LTRS did not go to waste… the things I highlighted and the commentary I made I did save. So nothing has been lost except countless hours I should’ve spent tending my garden. [Both inside and outside.]

…

I read this and had to say something:

“The status signal is circular: you can afford to be selectively online because you have capital, and being selectively online signals you have capital. The rest of us are still grinding for algorithmic visibility because we don’t have another choice.”

So Eugene Healey on Substack is saying in his essay that being selectively online means you can afford to do so… this means if you’re not well off then you have no choice but to show up online? What the fuck is this? Well, this is a misconception so many people have these days… and he’s only feeding into it.

He continues: 

“Going dark ultimately serves power instead of negating it. The ability to opt out of visibility is itself a privilege that reinforces existing hierarchies. The truly powerful don’t need to perform their status online because their status is already legible in rooms that matter. The rest of us are left performing our way toward legitimacy on platforms designed to extract value from that performance.

So the status signal isn’t actually in being offline. It’s in having the capital – social, economic, cultural – to be selectively online in ways that benefit you without feeding the machine more than necessary.”

Basically, unless you fucking “show up” online you’re just feeding the elite? What is this garbage? Yes, I am fortunate enough that I don’t have to rely on performative nonsense. So I’m a total elite asshole I guess. I don’t understand where he’s going with this. Sounds like a hopeless proposition of living in a feedback loop. Maybe I shouldn’t bother showing up at all! I think the author is TRYING to be helpful here, but it’s not working. 

Believe me most people that are actually making it are, in fact, not visible at all. By design. The fact we think we have to be plugged in IS the problem. But he seems to gloss over that very clear fact. I don’t know if he’s being sarcastic or what. I’m actually not mad at the author directly, but where is he coming from here? What is he really on about?

…

The Picture of Dorian Gray has so many great quotes. Thanks Emmalie for giving something worth watching: 

…

The staff picks on sublime are getting curious. You still get good stuff, occasionally. Like a picture that says “patience is also a form of action” – I totally agree with this. In fact, I was just thinking about the importance of patience when reading things that mega piss you off or you want to do something but can’t decide what to do so you should just chill out and let the answer come to you… because sometimes it does… 

Also Emily thinks I’m a top shelf person. Apparently she’s been telling me this for years. Well, the rest of the world either hasn’t noticed or somehow thinks the exact opposite. 

And all that guy’s essay did is make me want to be online LESS! This world makes no fucking sense. And here I am trying to figure out what I should do online and it turns out everyone thinks that NOT being online means you’re a shithead elite. Hmm. It seems that people have lost the plot, except the plot where they waste space with an overpriced coffin and headstone…

My point is, there is this bizarre cycle of being hateful that’s so strong that it perpetuates into this sort of admiration for those we love to hate. And Emily and I are among that latter category now. So when I saw a diagram that said “admired” to “hated for being admired” then “admired for hated for being admired” my point was made. 

People’s priorities are super screwed up. And my own priority needs to be reducing my online consumption. I do need to read more. But I’m struggling with what to read. Maybe I should read more Postman. Yeah he was a bit wrong about computers being overrated (understatement of the century) but he was right on so many other counts. I need to focus on getting organized just for myself. 

Emily had a rough day so I made pasta for us. I wasn’t really up to it but I managed and the spaghetti was good. Emily needed me badly. And we’re both frustrated with the state of things. We both want to get out and live life. But at the moment, neither of us is sure what that looks like. Everyone we know is struggling, dying, or already dead. Fun times for sure.

I really need to cut down on my YouTube consumption. I did say this yesterday and today. I can have ASMR on to calm me down or watch videos on subjects I’m interested in. But my whole plan of putting things in watch later and setting them aside hasn’t happened yet. I don’t want to schedule YouTube time or limit myself specifically. But I need more actual quiet time. Especially when I’m fatigued and input is a bad idea. Even music is too much when I’m in a state like this, the white noise from my fan and/or heater are all I can stand most nights. So subjecting myself to too much youtube is sort of torture, unless it’s strictly ASMR. 

I keep saying I’ll write in my moleskine and I never do. I was going to use it to write the things I don’t necessarily want to put in my journals… asking a bunch of off the wall questions and setting them aside for a while to let them marinate, I guess. I have resolved recently to ask better questions in search of even better, more insightful questions. I have to question everything at this point. I don’t want to go to sleep at 6pm, and I did have a short nap earlier, but I don’t have anything left in the tank to give.

I am beyond grateful for Emily and all that we have, all the people I’ve found to watch and learn from. The ASMRtists for helping me find sleep somehow. Especially Jozette, that girl is magical. Must be the Scottish accent. I am grateful I have the opportunity to work on my words. I should no longer consider my legacy as being the best I’ve done because what’s more important is that I keep creating. And my end goal should be that my writing isn’t the end goal of the ideas I lay forth and the questions I pose. I want my ideas to live on, whether or not I get credit is immaterial at this point. 

I want to leave as much of what I have to give before I inevitably pass on. I don’t know when that will be. My health isn’t great. And yes I do need a friend. Emily is going to need another friend soon too… and we may already know her. Or we may not. The time, it seems, will make itself known. As much as I’d like to have a content creation partner, what I really need is a memory making partner. We all do.

February 6, 2026

What is life but a series of both unfortunate and fortunate events arranged in a typically illogical and unpredictable order?

This is the sort of question I come up with when I’m up at one in the morning for no adequately explainable reason that sleep became inconvenient for my mental processes. 

Emily has no further plans for this month at the moment. Which is unusual to be sure. She really wants to spend time with me and work on her book. I suppose I should do the same, spend time with myself and my book. The fiction and the… other fiction that is the strange sequencing of events I know as my life.

I’m really glad that Emmelie’s video about the picture of Dorian Gray convinced me to read it. It’s the least disappointing thing I’ve read in a long time, fiction wise at least. Like Postman, I have something to say every few sentences but I’m holding off until I finish the book. I need to simply enjoy reading again, as I should enjoy writing, too. 

At this point the lines between fiction and nonfiction are blurring. I have been guilty of being too vague to protect the innocent and too specific to call out the guilty. I suppose anyone who participates in this travesty of a “free” society is guilty of something, but I don’t think dropping names and taking bombs is the strategy I wish to employ in telling these stories and conveying these ideas I have rattling around my skull. 

For the sake of both my future self and anyone who subjects themselves to the tortured nature of these words, I will try to cease with any sort of pleasantries, platitudes, or rhetorical throat clearing. What follows will include some chattering about various folks about shooting shit and taking stances on trivial matters that somehow become headline news. I don’t bother with the headlines because they are all lies anyway. Even the truth isn’t factual anymore. Nothing makes sense, and I’m not sure if it ever did; human beings take themselves way too damn seriously and so did I until apparently right now in the middle of a Thursday night into Friday morning… 

Perhaps reading Oscar Wilde was a mistake, or it was fortuitous…

I did ponder the writing of letters to my future self for a time, and hesitated because the concept has been done often enough before that I am fairly certain I have nothing to bring to that niche of any consequence. That being said, I am no longer writing letters to no one in particular, and while that’s cheeky and seemingly clever, it’s also bullshit, and the world is already drowning in toxic amounts and endless varieties of that. 

My goal right now is to cut out any more regressive behaviors and ways of thinking, especially in terms of nostalgia and the acquisition of more unnecessary material anchors. One can live in the moment and still be forward thinking, but as in a progressive and not future focused mindset. The future is coming whether we want it to or not, just as tonight has slipped away from me as rest somehow got sidelined for some bizarre flights of fancy testing the limits of my prose and ability…

February 8, 2026

It is negative eight degrees this morning on Super Bowl Sunday. I don’t care at all about the game at the moment. It would be neat for the Patriots to win, but of course a lot of people don’t want that to happen. These aren’t the same Patriots, though, as the TB12 days. And a lot of people don’t care about the Seahawks. It really could go either way. [It went the way a lot of people didn’t expect…]

I had kind of a rough dream last night going back to Colorado to try and reconnect… it went very badly, but there was a happy ending. On the way out of wherever I was meeting people, this petite cutie pie of a redhead ran into me dropping her groceries. I helped her pick them up and saw she had all violife dairy substitutes in her bag. This was after I was told that my old “family” were going out for ice cream and that if I didn’t come I was a loser. Anyway the girl was very standoffish at first, although she let me help her, as she complained about how untrustworthy and awful people are. She let me into her apartment and we talked for a bit. I took my leave as it seemed she was getting a migraine. I didn’t even get her name. 

Fortunately, the next day, I ran into her at work, a convenience store that had just been robbed. I walked her home. We had a nice chat. She was telling me about her business ethics class she wrote a paper for and got a c-minus because the professor was mean. I saw the paper and immediately asked her why she was bothering with school. At thirty two she was going back to college to put her life back together after a nasty divorce. She was then shocked to learn I was trans and she had some unfriendly comments about trans people. I took my leave politely but wasn’t sure I wanted to see her again. The next day that same store was robbed. And I learned the girl’s name from her boss. It was Jeuni. What a gorgeous name. He asked if I could check on her.

I went to her apartment and I knocked. Soon as she knew it was me she opened the door and hugged me, apologizing for all the things she said before. I told her she must have her reasons. When I revealed I knew her name she sighed and asked if we could go out to lunch at a Vegan place. The food was great and she explained that her ex husband Andre not only cheated on her, but it was with another man. That wasn’t the worst of it. He ended up transitioning to female. And her parents were really mean to her about it. So she got into an ugly divorce because now Andrea claimed it was Jeuni being hateful, which it wasn’t. Turns out Jeuni still loves Andrea. And Jeuni was falling in love with me. Her health went to shit with the stress of the divorce, her fundamentalist family, and school wasting her time. 

But once she met me, her health improved. After we hung out for a bit, I decided to stay in Denver to see if she’d come back with me. Eventually she didn’t come into work one day and when I went there she was on the bathroom floor sobbing. I realized what she was thinking of doing and demanded she let me help her. I finally admitted that I had the resources… I don’t know what happened to Emily in this dream… apparently something because I didn’t want to go home alone. I stayed with her that night and she started singing in her dream. Funny enough it was Juno. But she sang Jeuni. I realized that wow, this girl (she was 32) was madly falling for me but didn’t want to admit it. I don’t know how it ended because I woke up crying. Poor thing! And yeah if something happened to Emily, I would lose my mind and seek out someone to stay with me. I can’t be alone. And it would probably be someone like Jeuni. What an amazing name for such a curious girl.

I would’ve happily brought little Jeuni back with me to Vermont. Alas I cannot as she is an unconscious construct that was generated to make sense of all the complex emotions I’ve been feeling.

…

Emily discovered that there is a town in Vermont called Newfane that is the most politically active town in the noted states. So active in fact that they influence policy to this day. The whole town votes on everything. And I agree with them on like everything. In fact in 1982 they may have prevented nuclear war… and they are pushing anti ICE efforts now. It’s on the south end of route 30. [Probably won’t ever check it out now that I’m done with VT for good!]

…

Opalite has the greatest music video ever: 

…

This is a great video on competitive Pokemon by doctor aaron traylor: 

…

I’ve never been much for mantras, but Fern ASMR always has three really good ones to vote on each week in a YouTube community post and I always seem to pick the least popular choice. But I like all three of these: 

I allow feelings to rise and pass

I soften self talk and offer care

I notice moods without judging them. 

I chose the last one only because I’ve been thinking a lot about people’s prejudices and judgmental natures. But the other two are excellent to keep in mind, too. 

I thought these were definitely above average mantras. I’m going to be taking note of them every Sunday now. As for judging moods, I’ve been particularly critical of myself today for being in a “fog” as sometimes happens when it’s exceptionally cold or dreary. It was -5 degrees Fahrenheit this morning so that didn’t help. But a lot of my mood was centered around going out of the house yesterday and sliding all over the road because the roads aren’t plowed at all and having to contend with ice on every stretch from Middletown Springs to Rutland to Castleton to Poultney and back to Middletown Springs was so dangerous and scary that even my wife Emily, who was in public safety for 22 years and drove ambulances and rescue vehicles in this sort of weather, wasn’t sure we’d make it home, especially as we were in my bronco sport without four wheel drive. We did make it home safely, but for Emily to be that scared, that’s not normal. She admitted she thought we were going to crash the whole time. I did lose control a couple times. 

She wasn’t up for driving because she’d had weed shortly before we left. Fortunately I’m a fairly competent driver. No harm came to us, despite some multiple very angry people that passed us on several occasions likely realizing they were late to their accidents. I try not to judge these people. I try not to judge the fact that Vermont doesn’t have the salt to properly treat the roads during this particular nasty ice spell we’ve been under. But I’m judging myself most harshly for allowing that dangerous road trip to even happen because I wanted Chinese food. I did not possibly conceive that the roads could be that bad. And today I was barely able to write about a bizarre dream I had last night, finish the last few chapters of Picture of Dorian Gray and watch like six hours of YouTube… mostly about sports cards which I don’t even dabble in anymore, and which I don’t plan to outside of some crazy amazing find that I may come across. Why am I judging myself so harshly? I have no need to make money or be productive outside of simply not allowing myself to become idle and stagnant. And I hardly think I’m stagnant considering the sort of things I’ve been writing lately…

…

… I wouldn’t even know where to start with writing about my thoughts on education. It would have to be a book length dissertation to treat that subject with any of the depth it would require beyond a superficial bashing of surface level results of improperly managed funding and misapplied judgments of scientific research into “what works” in education. 

… I have, in the past few days, finally convinced myself that the present moment is all that matters now and going forward. And I do need to work on softening self talk considerably still. But most of all I need to stop judging myself so harshly as I’ve learned to judge others much less harshly unless they are being obviously bigoted, hypocritical, or both. And even then I have to consider the circumstances.

I’m trying to figure out how I want to approach things from the inside out. There are pieces I’ve had that I’ve needed to purge from the archives entirely or mark them as lost causes from which one day I may retrieve a couple lines to build something new. And a lot of these were either aimless rambles from bad days during my more stressful periods of the past few years…right now I’m trying to find my own voice again. 

I hardly ever have 100 percent energy during the winter. 75 to 80 maybe on a good day. And I’m bad at budgeting it. I hope over the next week I can revive a few more old essays. I don’t care so much about getting them visibility on my websites, even if I do repost them there as current posts, as much as I am getting them ready for the collected works I plan to publish within the next couple years. Honestly I’m not really that into writing essays anymore. I want to go on full on book length dissertation sprees and deep explorations of my own fictional universe I’ve been building for ages. 

It’s funny how I’m always more interested in the process than the result and a lot of my fiction may end up being more like mockumentaries and fake interviews than true novels. But I think that might be fun. [I have shelved my fiction indefinitely to focus on much more urgent matters.]

…

I wish this would be brought up in every introductory history course ever:

“History, no doubt, has splendid lessons for our instruction, just as all good art comes to us as the herald of the noblest truth.But, to set before either the painter or the historian the inculcation of moral lessons as an aim to be consciously pursued, is to miss entirely the true motive and characteristic both of art and history, which is in the one case the creation of beauty, in the other the discovery of the laws of the evolution of progress…”

Oscar Wilde, Essays and Lectures

And what follows in French:  “One must ask of Art only Art, of the past only the past.”

February 9, 2026

The Patriots may as well have stayed home rather than played in the Super Bowl. It was 19-0 Seattle when I went to bed… the Patriots tried to make a comeback, but then the Seahawks stepped on the gas and obliterated them over the last 10 minutes or so it seems. People lost a LOT of money betting on this stupid game.

Good for Sam Darnold who finally got to the top after years of struggling. The Seahawks were the better team as far as I could tell.

…I’m so used to just letting things stand as a roughly edited first draft, and at this point, I need my words to stand taller and more firm. I must be a truly dedicated digital gardener, and this includes dressing up and pruning my own work, too.

… The Picture of Dorian Gray is perhaps the first fiction book that has made me pause multiple times a page to marvel at the various ideas, especially the paradoxes of Lord Henry. I usually never get why a book is a classic, but this one I see why. I was already fond of Oscar Wilde quotes, and many of them, in fact, are from that novel.

…

This quote gave me pause:

“Please let this be over. I’m not ready for it to be over.” – ​Andre Agassi​

I recognize that name as a famous tennis player. And while it seems paradoxical, I get what he means here. There are so many things I was never ready to be over, even when it clearly was beating a dead horse or dragging a corpse along for some morbid company. Most of us never learn when to quit. Even when I have learned to walk away, something I’ve gotten surprisingly good at, my brain never quite quits.

Moving on…

“Charging too little is like eating soup with a fork: you’re always busy but always hungry!” – from Underearners Anonymous

I feel like I’ve heard this quote before, some years ago. That was my life for years; although funny enough, most of that work I made for myself, and it paid me in pennies per hour. Very sad stuff. I just like that imagery. It’s so cartoonishly brutal.

This one was a bit heart-wrenching…

“Students come to my office with problems I can’t begin to unpack. No, I can’t tell you why you have dreams about murdering people. No, I can’t explain why your dad told you it’s your mom’s fault you slice your arms up like deli meat. No, I don’t know why the doctor screwed up your prescription and you are out of your meds or why your sister won’t drive to Boston to get you more.

What they need is years of therapy and mental health care that their insurance will never cover. They need stable housing, better health care, braces, and acne medication.

What they have is me.

What I have is and.

So that’s what I tell them.

You can feel sad and you can do five math problems.

You can be nervous and write the last paragraph of your essay.

You can be anxious and pick up trash in the hallway.

You can feel mad and eat a piece of fruit.

And nothing will really be fixed, but then, it wasn’t really going to get fixed anyway. But maybe they’ll be a little bit better at algebra or feel a little bit healthier.

It’s not magic advice, but sometimes the nudge is enough to put things in motion again.”

Emily Kingsley – “You Are Not Okay and Tomorrow Will Come”

The power of “and” is not to be trifled with! Basically, things can suck, but if you just do something and stay in motion, you might not be OK but you’ll still be going forward. That’s kind of how I’ve kept going. I’ll be inconsolably sad and still revise an essay. I’ll stare my morbid fascinations straight on. I’m at least not allowing myself to become stagnant, perhaps my greatest fear at the moment.

But I really appreciate Emily Kingsley’s brutal advice. This world is awful, horrible, and cruel. There aren’t always answers besides indifference, apathy, and systemic rot and/or failure for the things that plague us. While collectively we should be working towards building better systems, we typically aren’t. We are still living our individual lives faced with obstacles that seem impassable, and yes, the best action, sometimes, is to take a simple action. 

It’s funny that the “You can be anxious and pick up trash in the hallway” is something I’ve actually done in school. And feeling mad and eating a piece of fruit, sometimes an apple or banana is all I’d eat all morning or even afternoon. Just to have enough calories to not pass out… good stuff today, even if it’s a bit on the rough side.

We’ll end with something thought provoking.

“The market for something to believe in is infinite.” – Hugh MacLeod

I’m frankly no longer sure what I believe in. I do want to believe in something, of course. That’s only natural. I want something to make sense. 

And while I’m already feeling quite fatigued from my meager efforts this morning, I at least nudged a few pieces back into the public eye and learned a bit more about what I’m willing to do just to stay some semblance of sane.

[Yeah, my iPhone was messed up BADLY and screwing up the entire internet at our house. And the new one I got I ended up trading in to AT&T in July for a Samsung Galaxy A26! I was done with Apple forever…]

February 10, 2026

Bleary eyed and foggy as ever, I kind of just want to go back to sleep. I probably should. I have plenty of ideas for fiction, but actually writing them is a chore. I just don’t know what’s left for me to write about. Most of the things I think about I’ve already written about in one way or another, and at this point I’m just trying to find better ways of saying them. 

There are, however, things that I simply don’t know how to express, things I want to say that I can’t find the words for… I actually abandoned my word of the day thing in late January, because frankly, it wasn’t inspiring me to write the way I hoped that it would. I love writing those definition essays when I’m in the mood. I had to at least admit just how bankrupt I am mentally and emotionally. Physically I’m not much better off.…

Anna Goose had an AMAZING video about love.

And there was this bit from tumblr in her video that I had to pause and type up:

“From thesweetiepienovels: Actually, you are enough. Even if you don’t work. Or study. Or go out. Or have friends. Or have family. You’re enough because you exist and your existence is enough to be enough because you are not a product. You are not a sum of output. You are not a task to complete. But because you are something the universe wanted and put here even if you’ll never understand why. Somewhere in the cosmos your existence makes a difference, even if it’s not the way others existences do.”

Yeah, no kidding. I love what she’s saying about how love isn’t a competition. And it shouldn’t be treated as a market. And other such things. So why do I hate myself so much? Why do I feel so unworthy?

Another amazing quote: “I think the hardest people in the world to forgive are the people we once were, the people we are trying desperately to not stir into the recipe of who we are now.” – Andrea Gibson, Lord of the Butterflies.

This quote sums up why I can’t forgive myself for fucking up my first thirty three years so horrifically. Then lucking into the results of the past five.

Anna said, self-respect needs to be seen as a decision making framework. And sometimes those decisions are going to make people really not like you. So, yeah, a lot of people just have no self respect apparently.

Both Emily and I have no respect from society. Even when Emily did all that stuff in fire rescue and in EMS… people lost all respect for that too. No one ever respected me until Emily. She’s the only reason I still bother to do anything at all.

It’s good Anna made that video today because it reminded me that the real reason everything sucks is everyone is competing for no reason other than misguided preconceptions drilled into us by media, family, and friends that most certainly don’t have your best interests in mind.

One more quote Anna put up in her incredibly timely video:

“Realizing at last that we can relax and be wrong is an enormous relief. Not only can we be wrong; we can rest in the certainty that we will be. We don’t have to know everything, and we don’t have to try and manage everyone in our lives so they behave to our liking, and we don’t have to stand behind the planet and push it to make sure it turns as we think it should turn. It won’t. They won’t. We can trust that we will mess up, that we will misbehave, and that the planet will continue to spin quite independently of our wills.” – Waiting, Marya Hornbacher.

Why is it that Anna finds the words that explain the things I never could find the words to say? Even if they are copy and pasted from Tumblr, crowdsourced wisdom from digital gardening. Anna has had such a good effect on me. And damn if anyone is WORTHY of love it’s Anna. I’m so lucky. So is she. But shouldn’t we all be? Like she said, love isn’t something we deserve. It just is.

We must give ourselves permission to fuck up, because we will. Hell, if I learned anything from that video, it’s that not only is innocence overrated, but it’s damn near impossible. We are sure as fuck all sinners, but we need to forgive ourselves and just keep going, making pasta, watching adorable Anna, and spending time with the one person that took a chance on us and won big… even if it all makes no sense, because why bother making sense of the absurd?

…

Cinzia had a great video about leaving things unfinished and going back to things you left unfinished, like her PhD. She feels like that whole year was a waste… but it really wasn’t, because she’s not the same person she was a year ago. [She’s gotten a lot stronger!] And her YouTube work is NOT a waste and thinking everyone else is getting things sussed out and doing things right… 

No, the ones you see do well just happened to get lucky. Seriously. And I’m glad her partner (who she’s marrying now by the way) enjoys her supposed nonsense. Because it’s not nonsense! Cinzia is awesome! But yeah, I don’t want to start anything out of fear that I won’t finish it… that’s why I’m not working on long-form projects. I stress myself over novels and book projects… I need to just chill out… funny that returning to her PhD is what chilled Cinzia out. Also, her partner asked her to marry him. That probably didn’t hurt. That man has superb taste!

I was just thinking that no matter how selfless we believe we are, we’re all still trying to satiate our own egos one way or another, to have some purpose, some part of something bigger than ourselves. And so many times we are so wrapped up in our own heads, coiled up so tight in fetal positions out of anxiety, fear, and even terror, that we fail to recognize that all the pieces of ourselves we’ve left behind are invisible until we see them for what they are. 

Cinzia talked about not being the same person she was when she started her PhD. From one day to the next, we are NOT the same people. I’m not the same person I was even a year ago, and I’m glad about it. And don’t ever worry about sussing things out or thinking other people know what they’re doing. They don’t. Even if they think they do. They’re just getting along okay at the moment. I would argue it’s better NOT to know what you’re doing, if you’re admitting it. You are much better off being hyper aware of your own ignorance than pretending you know a goddamned thing.

Emily told me that she respects me so much for knowing more than she does about a lot of things. Well, what good does any of that do me at the moment? I’m much more aware of what I DON’T know, and that’s what I focus on now. Otherwise I just get all complacent. I decided that my watching card videos isn’t even about nostalgia anymore. It’s about seeing just how much people don’t know, and they outright admit it. I respect that so much. And if you can find a supportive and respectful partner like I have in Emily, or Anna has in her boyfriend, or Cinzia does in her fiancee, that’s a really amazing thing. But it doesn’t make you any less if you don’t.

And I finally realize this. Emily doesn’t know why I love her. The reason… it doesn’t need to be explained. It simply is. Love is love, and it isn’t something you earn, but you give it free, unrequited or not. I still love all those who harmed me, directly or indirectly. And that’s why I hurt so badly. My existence and persistence of not knowing what I’m doing has inestimable value. And one of these days, I’m going to find the one person that needs me the most right when I least expect it. There is someone out there that will need me, maybe several people. I just don’t need to look for them because I think I already have… and just don’t know it yet. 

And yes Emily needs me, but that’s not what I mean. I still have unfinished business. But I don’t know what it is. The fact I’m still here has to be enough and I need to be patient and keep bettering myself.

February 11, 2026

I went to bed kind of early last night. Still waiting on my new phone to show up, and I’m so bleary eyed that trying to do anything productive is likely impossible. I did shower but had no appetite for breakfast. Maybe something will come up worth writing about, but at the moment… not really. I took yesterday off entirely from caring, and today, I’ve decided to care even less.

…

Well, this turned my whole day around: 

Jozette admitted that it took her until she turned 30 to even admit she’d had an ASMR channel as her main gig for over five years. Jozette! She has definitely inspired me to reconsider making my own channel. Emily said she’d help me with video loops so I can focus on the audio only. I really don’t want to be bothered with video editing. I just want to do whispered and soft spoken essay reading and rambling so that I can edit just the audio. No scripts other than some existing essay or poems. Yeah, it may do nothing. But I should try… I have a blue yeti just like Jozette 🙂

…

I REALLY like Rose Han’s advice. It’s funny because her best advice is exactly what I tried to do… save a 6-month emergency fund is what I did before I left my full-time job… And I’m SO GLAD she said that graduate degrees ARE NOT WORTH IT! THANK YOU!

I’m not crazy about her use of the term “brainwashing” yourself into being rich, but she’s also not wrong. Having limiting beliefs is the worst thing in the world. I’m now a multimillionaire and I STILL have limiting beliefs! It’s why I hesitated on starting a real card business for so long. Now it’s pointless, but I still want to DO SOMETHING. And it’s because I may have the money now, but I feel like I didn’t earn it. I still have BROKE beliefs, as insane as that is.

I’m really figuring out how to overcome a lot of the self-talk and self-loathing I’ve built up as armor over the years. I just NEED to feel connected to SOMETHING. Honestly, it was probably better off that I was indecisive about starting my reselling and trading card businesses. Sometimes inaction IS the best action. But I’ve now become very inactive. Not quite stagnant, because as you’ll be able to tell from my journals, I am doing a crazy amount of shadow work right now.

One of the things Rose Han brought up as a marketable skill was AI prompt engineering. This is something I’ve seen RJ (The Flourishing) do in his sleep. Since I abandoned SEO entirely, my writing has completely lost its focus. Although I think there’s value in the spontaneous, authentic, lo-fi nature of what I plan to create once the weather is bearable… it’s also an excuse to get exercise… I want to work on a skill, even if it’s just a hobby. Sitting here making extensive commentaries on books can be fun, but no one seems to find value in that. I started thinking too academically, which is highly ironic…

…learning to ask better questions IS the key to wisdom, I feel. So perhaps, learning to create better AI prompts, engineering them in a way to make them more valuable and able to be utilized by others beyond myself… maybe there is some major value there. But I don’t want to focus on AI… I’m just saying I need SOMETHING to think about besides regretting not starting my card business when I turned 18. Or 28. Or 38. It’s not the cards I care about. It’s feeling like I’m part of a wider industry again. So how can I do that with my low-energy, limited-belief self?

Time to do some serious shadow work… and not just generate writing prompts with AI to spam the internet… I think my best line of questioning myself at this point is how do I take the freelancing business acumen I have (I did have an actual freelancing business for a few years with my first ex after all), the SEO skills I built up between 2007 and 2020 (and still supplemented for a couple years after until ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, et al. took over the internet), and my writing skills I’ve been building since my early childhood… turn all that into some marketable skill – perhaps AI prompt engineering – that I’m willing to give away for free out of sheer boredom?

Right now the ideas [I have floating about in my archive] aren’t my main concern, but rather the questions they beg, and in turn, I want to be able to ask better, more probing, more durable questions that can be used for a variety of topics or subjects. The idea with Obscure Curiosities originally was to allow me to write about trading card games, Pokemon, anime, pretty pop girlies… whatever I was fancying at that moment… and allow it to have some substance beyond mere fangirling or obsession of the week. I long ago realized that informational content has a shelf life, but pieces that ask enduring questions are truly evergreen. 

Lately, I’ve been bandying about what I want to do with my trading card hobby. Since I’m at a point in my life where doing it as a business would be pointless (Emily and I don’t need any more earned income thanks to our passive cash flow far beyond what we need to sustain ourselves), I want to do something more philosophical with it. But rather than run circles in my head over and over listening to the same old complaints about card grading (yea, PSA is a shady company) and scams and the toxicity of breaking culture, etc… I want to truly understand WHY I’m still compelled to collect even as a minimalist. I realize it’s more about community than anything else. But how do I write about my thoughts on the trading card industry, and TCGs too, without being too “hot take” or simply ranting away about things that next month will be uninteresting?

…

I want to finally talk about why I gave up on vinyl. It’s not probably for the reasons people think. 

Part of it is the massive amount of petroleum products used in vinyl production. The costs are outrageous, the press quality is not always great… I’m fine with vintage vinyl, but a lot of the new releases are so limited on purpose. 

CDs are just so much more practical, easier to store and frankly, consumer grade turntables are fucking crap these days. After going through three in a year, I gave up. And as a collectible, I also prefer CDs. They aren’t as mass produced as you might think. A lot of people trashed them when streaming hit the scene and some CDs are getting super rare! And thus, this is what I want to find… the rare stuff that has upside as a collectible. And of course music I like. 

Yeah, now I can do a music-related channel that’s soft spoken without having to worry about copyright nonsense. I can just talk about it and nerd out about it and make a good investment at the same time!

I may do some screen record stuff with Discogs about the most valuable albums that week, too. Really interesting stuff, seeing the wants and haves in people’s collections are an interesting proxy for how popular an album is. My goal is to look at albums that have more wants than haves in CD form, because remember, not everything is on vinyl!

[The iPhone I got that day was such a PAIN IN THE ASS to set up and it never worked quite right. That’s why I ditched it forever in late July and went back to Android for good.]

February 12, 2026

Emmelie talked about an interesting book. The private papers of Henry Ryecroft by George Gissing. He’s somehow become a forgotten author. 

…

I’m not watching any card related stuff. No point in filling my brain with any more of it right now. Here and there sure it’s fine for some idle entertainment, but right now I find myself idle with the feeling that inaction is my best course of action. I have nothing more nice to say.

… I feel that I must put to shame all I’ve written before, as if these past versions of myself that come through my former works no longer have any value to me. I no longer feel compelled to commune with all the versions of me who thought that my legacy lay purely in the compounding of countless words in print. And yet, I know there are so many questions I’ve left unanswered, mostly because I didn’t ask the questions in quite the right way. 

No matter what framework I build for myself, I always find leaks through which my prose never fails to drip through. No framework we ever make will be perfect, or even suitable for our needs, but we run with them anyway because we figure there isn’t much point in trying to perfect the imperfectable. What the hell am I even going on about, scribbling madly down every word that comes to my head as I fight the urge to simply waste away for a few more hours? 

Yes, sometimes we need as much of a mental rest day as we do for any physical ailment. But I feel my mental ailments at the moment will require so much rest that I may as well sign away the entirety of this year. 

I question the value of my remaining days, which should by their very nature of their decreasing number ahead become progressively more valuable. But I refuse to assetize or designate any value to anything at this point… I wish to simply bask in the intrinsic and the material. There is no need to delve deeper into the abstract or the statistical anymore. I need to break these horrible mental habits of trying to find optimizations and stop letting the pattern recognition algorithms baked into my autistic brain from ruining my creativity. It’s such a bizarre irony that while AI can’t save humanity, humanity may not have any other choice but to bet on it giving us the answers for questions we haven’t yet thought to ask.

I continue to have extremely annoying connectivity issues with all my tech. It’s all just abandoning me at this point. I refuse to buy any other tech at this juncture. It might sound ridiculous but I am very close to printing out any of my writings worth saving and just nuking my entire archive. Go back to purely pen and paper. I wish I were joking. I am ready to entirely reject the modern world. It’s not saveable and not worth saving.

If their products and devices weren’t the only things working for me at this point, I would do away with everything Google, too. These companies just all got too big and too powerful for their own good. We all need to pump the brakes on our tech dependence.

… There is real money being bet on Jesus returning in 2027. I think the more money that’s bet on that possibility, the less likely Christ reappears, I can tell you that! FFS, it seriously is not even funny at all. I have other things I want to say, but none of them are going to make any sense, and aren’t worth putting into print anyway.

I feel like my content archives will soon be more like a graveyard than a repository of useful raw material for future projects. I don’t even want to think of projects because far as I’m concerned, I’m done with producing products. I have no service left to offer. I’m just spitting various syllables that happen to conform with some existing vocabulary and grammar. Nothing really makes sense to me anymore.

Why I’m leaning on collecting CDs: Streaming services aren’t sustainable. Eventually we aren’t going to have unlimited access to our favorite tunes; honestly it’s such an unhealthy ecosystem anyway that physical media has to win out eventually. Emily has been rediscovering music from the 90s, specifically the early 90s that I may have missed a lot of stuff because I was so young. There are still wide gaps in my music knowledge. I’m sure there always will be. I honestly don’t have the same nostalgia for the 90s that Emily does, even if I should. I just know better, how destructive this longing for an unreachable idealized version of the past truly is.

… I was thinking about how these days the Pareto principle doesn’t really work for figuring out investments… it seems that a 95-5 principle works better, the top 5 percent of any assets in a given market get 95 percent of the money. That might be an exaggeration but I’m not sure it is.

February 13, 2026

Anything I do at this point is not money motivated. I’ve actually considered putting some of my own money in index funds but why would I bother? Isn’t that just greedy at this point? So I want to spend some small portion of my interest on something that actually enriches my life.

I’ve just been so miserable because I just have nothing productive to occupy my time. My initial plans for projects in 2026 didn’t excite me. I need to focus more on curating than creating more headaches and busy work for myself! And I need to put my head back into music.

Well, I definitely appreciate somebody that I used to know a lot more now: 

February 14, 2026

Right now I’m suffering from choice paralysis; I could do so many things and I can’t choose what to do. It’s easy to just say “live in the moment” but for me that means feeling paralyzed and running in place. Yes, I have succeeded in being more intentional about what I watch and the things I do for entertainment, but to what end? I know I’m on the verge of some major breakthroughs in my art, and the ideas are there. I really should just lay them all out, but it’s like I’m afraid of what I’ll find… or what I will fail to find. 

I said to Emily last night, if you saw the things I’ve been writing over the past few months, you’d be shocked. It’s just figuring out how to deploy them in a way that lays bare the absolute cacophony of abstraction buzzing around in my gray matter.

I’m trying to ground myself a lot more lately, recognizing that for all the value I’ve gained in my hobbies and haphazard “studies” (it’s really too kind to call them studies) there is zero reason to extract cash from any of it.… My mindset is just so incongruent with my reality, and it seems Emily is struggling with the same exact problem.

When it comes to AI, I’m at this weird intersection between “LLMs are taking my agency and are propped up by evil tech bros” and “LLMs and machine learning may be all that’s left to save humanity from itself.” This sort of cognitive dissonance only adds to my ambivalence for living in any way that resembles a sane course of daily activity.

[As of July 2026, I only use AI for little things like article titles, email subject lines, search queries, and social media hashtags. Little stuff that is just going to waste my time that LLMs excel at. No outlining or creative work at all.]

Basically everything is an abstraction to me. Words are themselves abstractions. I keep thinking about what people have been saying on both sides of the fence; it does seem like there is a highly charged electric fence between the AI optimists and the pessimists. You have some very smart people saying that “AI” isn’t even real, that we’ve just fooled ourselves into thinking that advanced “thinking” large language models are just smoke and mirrors and are just reflections of our own egos searching for a savior from our own inadequacies. 

Then on the other side of the spectrum you have some very smart people saying that, yes, “AI” is kind of a misnomer; it’s more like machine learning and iterative natural language processing than actual intelligence. I try to come to a middle ground here; and as I’ve noted many times in my own journals, all AI is doing is acting as a mirror, but in that mirror we see a better version, more perfected version, of ourselves. LLM detractors talk about how these models will confidently lie and hallucinate. Well, of course, they will, because look who is programming them? 

If you read any of my journal entries from the past few months closely, you’ll see the gears in my head grinding so hard that they are nearly about to wear themselves smooth and unfunctional, just spinning around without much ticking going on. I’ve laid out all these different frameworks… trying to shift from a chronological to topological format that I haven’t fully adopted in reality yet. I have been thinking too linearly and vertically when the solution is to spread out horizontally; literally, I have considered printing out all of my best work on actual paper and spread it out all around me like a mad woman and sit in the middle of it meditating over what it all means. It sounds silly, but it is an actual course of action I’ve considered.

… 

I love how Zen Mode not only fixes weak Pokémon to be at least useable, I love his storytelling, especially with this Valentine’s Day special: 

…

I particularly was taken by the introduction of chapter three in the tale of two cities. 

“A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. ”

Charles Dickens, “A Tale of Two Cities”

https://books.apple.com/us/book/a-tale-of-two-cities/id395547695

February 16, 2026

I used to want to write something culturally relevant. But at this point I’m not entirely sure what the culture even is and whether I should recognize it at all. I continue to be at odds with myself about what to do with my writing. I really should just collect it, the best bits going every which where they seem to fit together and let it all sort itself out in the end. The more I try to impose any structure, chronological, topological, or otherwise, my best laid plans are wasted constantly and consistently. Huh, I thought I was inconsistent, but as it turns out I’m remarkably consistent, at not moving forward with much of anything. 

But I need to do something. I have too many clever things to keep hidden away in digital archives but I also don’t have much motivation to create any sort of meaningful dialogue with my nonexistent audience. It seems I truly am writing for no one in particular but myself. As much as I’d like to address what I write to a yet unknown future version of myself, as that is likely the only party besides perhaps Emily to take anything I write seriously. But I suppose that somewhere down the line someone will happen upon my ramblings and countless digressions and find some value to steal away to make themselves feel all the more clever.

I’ve become obsessed with a phrase from Tale of Two Cities: “the Circumference of Truth.” As opposed to the Centre of it. That sounds like the title of a truly pretentious work of high brow philosophical posturing and decadent wordplay. Seems right up my alley.

…

[Below are some moleskine musings I transcribed from 2020-21, and I’m just putting them in here rather than give them a separate post.]

On intentions (2020)… The greatest intention a soul can have is the decision to live the very best life possible. How this gets done is often highly variable and can change remarkably from day to day. The trick to staying on course when intending the most perfect path for yourself is to maintain a constant, steady flow of ideas to act upon. It isn’t enough to simply have ideas if they can’t be then put into action. From sunrise to sundown, the light touches us all a bit differently each day. Some days, it seems to fail in touching us much at all. Rest assured, though, you will always find a ray of sunshine if you know to look for it. Even if you miss it during the day, there’s always a glimmer or two of starlight to set you straight!

On chemical reactions (2020)… The chemical reactions within our mortal shells don’t define us. But how we choose to maintain balance – or instead give into the chaos – is what defines our true character. Being forced into boxes causes people to set arbitrary limits for themselves, or we become saddled with responsibilities that shouldn’t have been ours in the first place. The more you break free of anything that can allow you to be controlled – fear being chiefly among them – the easier it is to find your true inner strength and unique power. 

… simply setting yourself to composition keeps the creative line moving.

On perplexing dreams (2020)… Confusing dreams are both a good and bad thing. The good part is when we wake, it’s far easier to dismiss the confusion out of hand. The bad thing is that these confused creams often mean our energies are out of balance or in some ways conflicting. Right now, I have obvious physical maladies to consider as explanations for my befuddled dream-states. But that doesn’t mean I should simply dismiss my confused thought-streams. The good news is that I awoke in a better mood and I have plenty of good, wholesome creative projects to work on to sustain me. 

(To think I had more optimism then than now. It shows how much the past five years going on six have truly beaten me up!)

On a particular dark night of mine (2020)… Last night was one of my worst in weeks. It was one bad dream after another. I could blame it on a digestive issue, one I should have foreseen having. But the messages those dreams gave me were too specific to be a sign of gastrointestinal distress. I will not write down what these messages are as doing so will only help them into being realized, which I very much don’t want. I nearly gave into the blackened and sour mood these psychic downloads put me in, and I nearly failed to complete my morning routine…

On writing prompts (2020)… Writing prompts are wonderful things, often provoking lines of thought you may not have considered before. For me, though, I often find most prompts to have one of three problems for me. One, many prompts are far too specific. Two, many prompts are too broad and don’t allow for me to focus much on the subject. Third, some prompts ask questions I’m simply not comfortable with answering in writing, and there are varying reasons for this depending on the prompt itself. Since I’ve made a dedication to daily journaling again, I have sought out various literature on writing prompts and have found the most fall into one of those three categories I mentioned. Thus I have to daily find a train of thought to board, some of which happen to go nowhere interesting, if anywhere at all. 

On forms that beauty may take (2020)… Beauty takes many different forms; some of which aren’t obvious at first glance and perhaps not even seen at a second glance. Nature itself is a most perfected form of beauty, and as obvious as that should be, most people only have a casual appreciation and some lack even that! As I’ve decided to take a more interpretative approach to my writing, I must recognize it as a fine art that in producing and not simply ramblings brought on by boredom or frustration made permanent in ink as my blood flows true into the words blue and black, or whatever color the implement I have at hand is built to channel. 

On the regular appearance of the Three of Swords (May 31 2021)… The Three of Swords is a card that comes up for me far too often, and should that be a surprise considering I’ve felt this world, almost as a whole, has failed me; not only to recognize my strengths and meager, yet perhaps also significant, contributions, as well. It’s fortunate that the Mystical Cats of my non-traditional tarot deck depict this troubling omen as a scene of cars of the Sky Clan making mischief for trouble’s sake alone. 

Constantly lately, the primary subject of my thought process is gathering up the will to walk away from expectations, not only those unfairly impressed on me by an indifferent society, or even once well intentioned directions of my elders, but those I’ve impressed on myself fueled by failures and colored by emotional and spiritual imbalances. It’s fortunate that I turn to the Mystical Cats rather than the traditional Waite deck, as the scenery depicted presents an opportunity to simply walk away from the mischief and find freedom in the forests of the unknown. 

Consistently as I have walked the boulevard of broken dreams, the only road I’ve ever known, I dreamed of a companion who not only desired,  it required, the same need for reflection brought on by communing with nature on a regular basis. While I believed I had found this companion, I truly had not, as circumstances would soon lead me down a path of no return. Yet so swiftly I altered my path, so suddenly, and yet in a moment of nastiness and spontaneity I found exactly whom I was searching for in my Emily. Perhaps I know that meeting her was my destiny all along, but as one who believes whole-heartedly in the sanctity of free will, any notions of predestination are often dismissed in my mind almost as soon as they float on by. 

In my teenage years I came to realize that angels and demons are actually the same thing… (I revisited this idea in June 2025 in some more depth.) 

… Now as I fill a page with words that seem to require the use of far more adverbs than professors and grammatical tyrants would allow and prescribe copious amounts of red ink to dispel, I now retire briefly. [I embellished that a bit more by the way]

… the main issue that scholarly types have had over the years with my prose is that what it suggests is much more dense than the words that are actually written. A single sentence could suggest an entire essay, a single paragraph implying a feature-length tome, and an essay requiring an entire set of volumes. 

… as summer approaches and the sun rises earlier the waking hour grows earlier too. There is something biological about longer days forcing us to dig a bit deeper to fill daylight hours with more meaning. It’s as if the cycle of the seasons continues to affect our productivity in unconscious ways we often ignore, especially at extreme times as the solstices.  

(I had no idea so many gems were left untranscribed in here…)

… structuring ideas is often the difficulty, not their generation. 

That was not the archival work I expected for today, but thanks to these discoveries I was absurdly productive. 

February 17, 2026

Highlights From A Tale of Two Cities:

“A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other…” 

“The beach was a desert of heaps of sea and stones tumbling wildly about, and the sea did what it liked, one what it liked was destruction. It thundered at the town, and thundered at the cliffs, and brought the coast down, madly.”

” … on the question of rebuilding Tellson’s [bank]. In this respect the House was much on a par with the Country; which did very often disinherit its sons for suggesting improvements in laws and customs that had long been highly objectionable, but were only the more respectable.

Thus it had come to pass, that Tellson’s was the triumphant perfection of inconvenience.”

“Death is Nature’s remedy for all things, and why not Legislation’s?”

“Unbelieving Philosophers who were remodelling the world with words, and making card-towers of Babel to scale the skies with, talked with Unbelieving Chemists who had an eye on the transmutation of metals…”

“The leprosy of unreality disfigured every human creature in attendance upon Monseigneur.”

“…much discoursing with spirits went on—and it did a world of good which never became manifest.”

“Dress was the one unfailing talisman and charm used for keeping all things in their places. Everybody was dressed for a Fancy Ball that was never to leave off.”

Charles Darnay of the Marquis’ estate: “To the eye it is fair enough, here; but seen in its integrity, under the sky, and by the daylight, it is a crumbling tower of waste, mismanagement, extortion, debt, mortgage, oppression, hunger, nakedness, and suffering.”

“…the owl made a noise with very little resemblance in it to the noise conventionally assigned to the owl by men-poets. But it is the obstinate custom of such creatures hardly ever to say what is set down for them.”

I did manage to read a few chapters, so I at least made some progress on that front.

I’m trying to get a sense of the threads I’m tugging at while pondering the events of the book. I typically don’t enjoy “slow burn” type stories but this one is different. Dickens has a lot to say about his own time as much as the 1780’s. And I feel like in many ways we are on the verge of having something much like the French Revolution coming in the near future. There are just so many parallels.

I will say that I am quite taken with Lucie Manette, who is described as perhaps the most desirable bachelorette ever, but she doesn’t want to leave her poor daddy behind. It’s so sweet. But she is also clearly highly intelligent as she is compassionate.  I’ve become quite fond of her.

I know Dickens isn’t going to write Lucie with the depth and nuance she deserves. But all the same, she is such a foundational character in this book and I like her a lot! I just am absolutely floored just how much Tale of Two Cities has to say in terms of the fact that what befell France in the late 18th century appears to be the same sort of society likely to appear in the coming years as AI takes out so many jobs and right wing and left wing extremists alike take drastic measures to ensure the other side takes a hit regardless of whoever in the middle gets hurt. 

I just never expected this book to affect me so much. I suppose deciding to finally read the classics I so long rejected out of disdain for institutional education and literary tradition was what I needed to try and expand my horizons just enough to stop being such a shoe gazer.

… I have been collecting some of my works from a few years ago and rediscovering value in paragraphs I would’ve previously discarded. I’m making it a point to compile my reading notes in a more organized fashion and I’m no longer hesitating to bold face phrases that seem to be lightning strikes for inspiration. I have been considering going through my journals and pulling the best bits and building a narrative of my autodidactic journey.

The algorithm on YouTube has decided that I want pictures like Sabrina posing for her Sweet Tooth perfume displayed under every video I watch. I think I approve. My only gripe is that how am I supposed to watch the video with that level of distraction?

February 18, 2026

I didn’t even have a bad night and yet I woke up supremely grumpy around 630. Probably because I actually had a fun dream where I was jamming out with cool people and Sabrina was there. She and I were having a good time, too. Then I woke up and found Emily extremely upset because everyone excluded her in her life, the same thing that happened to me once I turned like thirteen…

Been playing Fortnite creator islands all morning, especially this kraken boss fight one. Didn’t eat breakfast and don’t really think I’m having lunch, either. I’m in a dark place today apparently… Emily made dinner for lunch because neither of us were going to eat until dinner unless we did. I’m going to force myself to work on something. But my brain is just mush today. 

As I was poking around my moleskine musings, it seems my observations about the world four years ago are quite prescient. Things have, indeed, gotten much worse. And I had a toilet thought about productivity: how much of our time and energy is spent solely on the acquisition and selling of more things we don’t need?

On productivity aimed towards creating true wealth: I have plenty of that wealth, so much free time that I simply lack much of a framework as to what to do with it. Unfortunately, the energy and motivation rarely catch up to my ambitions for deep dives into every which way of philosophizing about our modern day trials. Instead, I’ve spent much of the past few days playing Fortnite, but specifically the creator made islands, not even the main game. Some of them are incredibly janky, but some of them are quite clever and well made and I appreciate the efforts that went into them. 

And the only reason I play Fortnite is that unlike so many other MMOs today, it doesn’t involve Pay-to-Win mechanics at all, although there are ways to get powerups in the creator made islands using V bucks. I spend a minimal amount to get what I want, especially the recent Chappell Roan skins (I usually play as Sabrina Carpenter, what a surprise!) The fact I have so much time to play Fortnite (and the resources to purchase plenty more V bucks than I do) is a wealth that most people don’t enjoy… and even people with similar financial resources to myself have their money tied up in so many different things, whereas mine is mostly liquid and in low-risk stuff like ETFs, bonds, and CDs.

OMG, occasionally, Gemini comes up with some great stuff, like the “autodidact skill tree!” I love that! Also the phrase, “the vacuum of my intentions,” sounds like one of those spicy titles for a philosophical rant about the vaporware of my many book series that exist only as mere conceptions and mentions in my journals.

According to WolfeyVGC’s bug facts, Swadloon is based on the Japanese lifestyle called hikikomori, which is a full withdrawal from social life. “This can also be seen in Pokemon fans!” He jokes. Although it’s true. I should look into this… I didn’t really choose that lifestyle on purpose, as I said to Emily today. But it sure seems that way. 

… I also cannot believe the proliferation of cruelty lately…

February 19, 2026

As I’ve been doing so often this winter I snoozed until quarter till eight. I took inventory of my feelings, hopes, and dreams, finding the latter two bankrupt and the first of the lot extremely baffling. I still can’t believe that after all I’ve been through and how miserable I’ve been most days, I still am at the center of someone’s Plans, that being Emily’s. 

I have Alanis’s “uninvited” stuck in my head for some reason. It does seem that I have a reluctance to ever fully open up my heart again, and that’s why it’s so easy for me to show so much love for people I don’t really know. Emily sees me as the love of her life, and while I should reciprocate, it’s not that I don’t feel that way, it’s that I greatly struggle to do so in any sort of physical way. I simply am not good at giving away affection to anyone but a goddess so far removed from me. I am, in a sense, very damaged. 

I spent the majority of yesterday wasting time on Fortnite creator islands. I did break to work on a couple ideas, and none of them really went much of anywhere, but that has to be okay. This winter has been hard on so many folks it seems, and especially Emily and me, whose lives are in a holding pattern. I didn’t even read yesterday so I need to remedy that today and while I shouldn’t “force” myself to do anything, I can’t just stick my head back in Fortnite, especially as I have nothing left to unlock for the season without pumping more money into it. The sad thing is I easily could, and yet I’m reluctant. I don’t want that game to become my life for a period like so many other games have. 

I was saying to Emily that she did everything right and got hated for it. Then she married me and then people hated me too. She doesn’t understand why I think she’s Goals. Because most people’s goals are not really goals, but signposts along a predetermined path that was never their own. (Emily especially liked that bit.)

The idea of signposts vs real goals is the best idea I’ve had all morning. It seemed a necessary rejoinder for Emily’s inquiry as to why I care for her so much. For domestic life to remain stable and equanimous in these trying times, it is best to withhold affection and budget it for truly trying moments, as Emily has had recently dealing with the rejection of everyone she knew from her hometown and the showing of true colors of people she long thought were her friends. Since I have no one in this life besides her to call even a friend or family member at this point, she has become my singular focal point of my social energies, even as I have retreated otherwise from social life almost completely. 

But Emily sees herself as a burden upon me, and I don’t feel that way at all. Perhaps the reason I show the distant goddesses, my Angels, so much affection is because I need to feel connected, even if only tangentially, or forever withdraw into total darkness. I would no longer characterize my affections as para-social, as I have been wont to do in the past, but more of an intellectually charged though certainly not emotionally detached nature.

I do feel a bit lately like I’m preparing my own grave lately, making peace with the fact that if no one wants to partake of the autodidactic knowledge I’ve acquired – thus far Emily is my only “customer” in that regard – that I will not be long on this earth. And we discussed recently why I have been so reluctant to organize and collect my works into something that a layperson may have some hope of following… it’s because I don’t want someone to dig it up and claim it for themselves and I become entirely forgotten. I’m even coming to the realization that whether we are forgotten or not in the long term, though, doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t change the impact of our resolutions and productions, does it?

It is rather fantastic to me that I’m finding such brilliant parallels in my own concerns in A Tale of Two Cities, of all places. It is a similar feeling that I used to see my mom elicit when she would take a reading from one of those Our Daily Bread devotional booklets when I was younger. There is no harm in reading something in a book, the Bible especially, and finding some analogy for your own troubles and coming to some solution based on the language provided by what is ostensibly a random choice of reading for that day. 

I remember when I started using my tarot deck as a replacement for those Daily Bread devotionals, and I found myself having the same recognition of divination that many people find in the Bible. [I’ve since returned to the ODB daily devotionals, as well.] Now I find it in thoughtful essays I happen to stumble upon through someone else’s bookmarking them on the sublime app or now even in a Dickens classic or a nonfiction book on economics or “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” 

Reading is truly powerful, isn’t it? It is the only way for our minds to truly slow down and consider that what we are dealing with in our current moment, while certainly different in the shapes and the colors with which we recognize the past, are not all that different in weight and currency of the problems from centuries past, even if the context is quite different. I’ve been reading too much Dickens and the level of my prose’s complexity has henceforth blossomed into something a bit unwieldy, wouldn’t you say? 

[These were the seeds of what became my doctrine of Intentional Bibliomancy!]

I think what I’m really struggling with at this point is that I have taken up all the Signposts and used them for fire wood or some other smelting based activity. Now my Goals are basically simply to ensure Emily’s happiness and not simply waste away my days feeding the beast of “free to play” mechanisms of time-sucking. Nothing is truly “free to play” because time is such a fleeting precious resource. I’d be much better over building language like this in the sandbox of my Google Docs than whittling away the hours chasing down Brainrots and fake dollar signs and even Victory Crowns. 

In the past I’ve toyed with creating a daily newsletter of one absurd thing to consider each day to make what is often a dull, aggravating reality a bit more tolerable. I’ve even considered going back to my tarot deck just to have that grounding morning ritual again. But I think letting my words fly free and allow my notions to leak all over the place and let you try and clean them up for me is a much more worthwhile and less restricting activity. [By July, I eventually found this grounding in the daily devotionals I grew up with, but the online version.]

On visualizing the difference of intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation… I have certainly leaned hard into intrinsic motivations, but the allure of the extrinsic is still tugging at the edges of my consciousness, and for the past few days, playing Fortnite has made me feel “connected” to the “real world” again. But the truth is it’s what Dickens would term as the “leprosy of unreality” eating away at me. Whereas we have extrinsic motivations being the drivers of the beast people like to call “Capitalism” – grades, points, money, career, exams – I’ve been trying to focus on purely intrinsic motivators. Those being Purpose, Interest, Mastery, Curiosity, and to some degree, Pride. 

I think that the “Autodidact Skill Tree” that Gemini and I messed about with should have tiers for Purpose, Interest, Mastery, and Curiosity, but instead of Pride, I would instead focus on Self-Actualization. For years, I talked a “big game” but rarely followed through with my Grand Plans or executed on any of my Foolproof Frameworks. I think instead, these “sandbox games” are a much better use of my energy; there’s no point speaking a great monolith into existence when you are entirely lacking the raw materials to bring it into being. 

Conversely, laying a foundation one stone at a time will ultimately lead to a similar result, building a tall pyramid based on the four pillars of Criticism, Rhetoric, Aesthetics, and Philosophy, using those five “Skill Tree Focuses” as guiding markers. I think I’m onto something really interesting here?

I constantly question the purpose of my writing activities, as well as those moments when I ponder the absurdities of not just modern life but the contradictions that have made it impossible for me to trust pretty much anyone besides Emily because I know one day down the road, something will be revealed about one of my goddesses that will cause me to shatter the pillar from under her. I’ve shattered a few pillars over the past few years.

The whole idea of “living in the moment” is not the same thing as “living in a constantly evolving present.” I’m trying to do the latter. And honestly, were I to take an idea from yesterday, or the day before, or last year, or five years ago, I’d be doing an intense rhetorical autopsy on it so rigorous that it would obliterate it almost entirely. One can only extract so much blood from a stone, if there is any to be had at all, and the stones I’ve been turning over lately have been hiding away colonies of worms, some of them the poisonous kind. Some of those stones I’d rather let lie, if you catch my meaning. I want to move forward and only refer back when my mindset is keen on iterating, not obliterating the imperfections and misjudgments of my both recent and distant pasts.

… It seems a complete contradiction that I woke up feeling creatively bankrupt and yet here we are, after I read just a couple of chapters of Dickens, I’m suddenly finding my language revitalized and aimed so sharply at the edges of my consciousness like grapplers tugging at pulling all these disparate thoughts and notions together into something not only tangible but foundational. It’s an exhausting endeavor and I think the chief reason for my extreme fatigue lately is that it seems no matter how much I accomplish in the sandbox, it all just feels like playtime frivolousness. But perhaps at this juncture, my play IS my work. To play in this linguistic incubation game is my purpose, my quest, my best use of my precious time and rather limited mitochondrial capacities.

February 20, 2026

I need to actually let my brain rest, like what Emmalie (Prose and Petticoats) was saying in her video yesterday. Like me, she’s had times where she wants to do everything all at once and ends up just sitting there paralyzed and crying. Thank all that’s divine that she got a chance to work from home and allow her to enjoy her hobbies so much more. Her husband has incredible taste in women…

I keep asking myself, what did I do wrong, rather than what did I do right? I keep thinking back to what Picard said about you can do everything right and still lose, and that’s just life. Ever since that episode of the Next Generation came out when I was very little, I’ve NEVER forgotten that. How little could I have known that by trying to do everything right, I’d end up being the first lamb to the slaughter every time someone needed to be blamed for some injustice. And most of the time, the injustice was that I was born autistic and queer. Fun times.

All this nostalgia for the 90’s has been on the minds of both Emily and me. Frankly, I’m beyond sick of it. I don’t want to be reminded of when the world was “better” because while collectively we were certainly getting a lot of things right, well, the people ruining the world now were very much around then. People were still racist, bigoted, and horrible; it’s just they weren’t at the forefront like they are now. The worst part is, the Technopoly we have now was very much underway in the early 90’s, as Neil Postman pointed out. He even coined that term, apparently!

It’s really scary to me that all these thoughts I’ve had about the technocratic hellscape we’re in now were already thought by Postman over thirty years ago. That’s very freaky to me, and it tells me, the 90’s weren’t as great as we thought after all. Education was already on the decline, and 9-11 and the sudden massive religious conservative extremism just destroyed any chance of most kids ever having a future for good. I said to Emily this morning that religious extremists are going to get very bold in the coming years, ironically against AI, which they themselves are using heavily! 

I wouldn’t be shocked with how jobs are evaporating like dew on a mid-summer morning, people may be signing up to become walking time bombs in the name of the “Lord.” Extreme, yes, but increasingly possible. The next civil war will likely be fought mostly by people blowing themselves up in the name of some divinity and governmental reprisals wiping entire towns and perhaps even cities off the map. Fun stuff.

I just really love this sentence from Chapter 16 of Tale of Two Cities: “And as mere human knowledge can split a ray of light and analyze the manner of its composition, so, sublimer intelligences may read in the feeble shining of this earth of ours, every thought and act, every vice and virtue, of every responsible creature on it.”

Technology now dictates our lives in pretty absurd ways. “Making it” these days requires being tied to your “smart” phone and the internet at all times. You need to be alert of your notifications at all times. I used to joke about how few notifications I got in relation to how much effort I put into building presences on social platforms and submitting content every which where. But it was not actually a joke that I needed help sorting out my few and far between notifications. It was shame that I covered up with sarcasm. 

I have always worked in relative obscurity compared to my peers. Social media should have been a good thing. It ruined society en masse because the technopolists got a hold of it. Art, culture, and our very livelihoods depend on the continuous invasion of tech deeper into our lives and very psyches. It sucks and I hate it. I only use my phone out of convenience, otherwise I would literally have countless little notebooks and pens scattered across the house for every fleeting thought just to keep myself some semblance of sane.

Bill Nye and Steve Burns! 

They talked all about science and critical thinking and how the latter is a “habit of the mind.” Kind of crazy to me that the guy from blues clues has gotten this old and has a podcast. He talked to Adam Savage, too! Also about critical thinking.

February 21, 2026

I thought a lot this morning about how supposed allies turn their backs on Emily and me, I think, just because her and I are so impossible to put into boxes. She and I are illegible to most people, the way even my own “handwriting” chicken scratch is to me sometimes. They look like letters that form words, but good luck figuring out what they actually say! I used to write almost exclusively in cursive, but even perfect cursive penmanship is something most people can no longer read, either. Also my nerves make it difficult for me to properly perform all those delicate curves and swooshes so many words end up with very queer spellings… it’s much harder for me to transcribe.

I exaggerate, but seriously, I woke up very sad because autism is seen as such an affliction, when it is simply a way of neural processing that isn’t typical among the vast majority of people. It isn’t “caused” by anything other than some genes flipping certain ways, and there are a lot of scientists trying to “cure” it, but what really is the point? What we should be curing instead is people being hypocritical, cruel, and indifferent to one another. Although I don’t think genetic therapy is the cure for those particular ills, rather creating a culture of care and lovingkindness. We don’t have to “understand” each other beyond understanding that we are each our own mystery… 

I was going somewhere with this then drew a blank. I need to read some Dickens and level up my prose further. Seriously, reading Dickens has been quite the boon for me lately. To think I could no longer improve as a writer, when clearly that the best way to level up that skill is to consistently work on being a better human being, in that I must further balance the contradiction of being one’s own sovereign intelligence while also considering that the collective unconscious is a thing that science can’t quite yet fathom and assign a framework around.

I know how slight a thing it takes to completely throw me off and leave me to lie sobbing in my bed for hours at a time. I was inconsolable for about half an hour after I awoke this morning, laying my concerns on the imaginary presence of a particular diva I hold most dear. I try to lessen the weights of my grief and ill temper on such proxies before discussing things with Emily in a more reserved and delicate manner, and she always seems to be able to crack just the right joke to make me shake my head so I can return to my day.

…

So I’m on the chapter where Mr. Lorry has just seen Doctor Manette come out of his nine-day relapse into making shoes after Lucie was married to Charles. 

And this line really struck me: “He spoke with the diffidence of a man who knew how slight a thing would overset the delicate organisation of the mind, and yet with the confidence of a man who had slowly won his assurance out of personal endurance and distress. It was not for his friend to abate that confidence. He professed himself more relieved and encouraged than he really was…”

The way Doctor Manette describes his own condition in the third person is chilling to me: 

“You see… it is very hard to explain, consistently, the innermost workings of this poor man’s mind. He once yearned so frightfully for that occupation, and it was so welcome when it came; no doubt it rellieved his pain so much, by substituting the perplexity of the fingers for the perplexity of the brain, and by substituting, as he became more practised, the ingenuity of the hands, for the ingenuity of the mental torture; that he has never been able to bear the thought of putting it quite out of his reach. Even now, when I believe he is more hopeful of himself than he has ever been, and even speaks of himself with a kind of confidence, the idea that he might need that old employment, and not find it, gives him a sudden sense of terror, like that which one may fancy strikes to the heart of a lost child.”

My fingers stumbled all over that paragraph, FFS. Anyway, Dr. Manette used the making of women’s shoes on that toolbench as a way to deal with his deep mental anguish. I feel like that’s what I used my trading card hobby for, for so long, to distract myself from my true concerns by overcomplicating the acquisition and sale of relatively low-value cardboard rectangles. I never wanted to go into “higher-end” stuff because to me, it was all intrinsically the same, and why risk significant funds on an activity that was meant only to get me out of bed and put to work at something?

Now I also feel like various video games have become my occupation over the years, and lately, these creator islands on Fortnite have become a sort of fun diversion but also its own sort of occupation while I watch videos, something to do that I’m not often drifting off into a daze that then makes it quite impossible to retain any sort of reasonable sleep schedule. I wouldn’t even HAVE a sleep schedule were I not so employed to check on Emily and make sure she’s OK. 

Emily is my main occupation, and as I set my cards aside, it seems my intense reading and Fortnite have become my part-time labors. I need the Fortnite time to process what I read and also what I happen to be listening to as I do relatively mindless tasks in exchange for XP, which is entirely useless after a certain point, but seeing the level up bar keep going up is just enough of a dopamine hit to keep me from simply giving up on the day and retiring too early so that I can be up all night occupied with the darkest matters of my mind, body, and soul. I’d rather leave them to the unconscious in the wee hours of the night as I sleep, not keep me up and dizzy with disgust at the disorganization of my mental faculties and the fracturing of my emotional reservoirs… anyway I read on.

Anyway, Mr. Lorry is trying to dispose of the workbench so that Dr. Manette can’t return to it in a relapse… but how will that go? Well, Dr. Manette approves, and after a time Lorry and MIss Pross do the “dirty deed” and while they are trying to help their friend, they still feel like burning the workbench and burying everything else that they’ve committed a horrible crime.

The concept of these echoing footsteps that Lucie always hears… this is a very interesting thing. I wonder where this is building up to…I’m up to where it’s 1789, and the French Revolution is clearly about to be underway. And it’s like Lucie can hear what’s happening all the way over in France. It’s a curious manner of storytelling, I must say. The Bastille has been stormed by Defarge and company. Exciting! Truly, fun times! And this is when Defarge finds Dr. Manette’s old cell at the Bastille.”Now, Heaven defeat the fancy of Lucie Darnay, and keep these feet far out of her life! For, they are headlong, mad, and dangerous; and in the years so long after the breaking of the cask at Defarge’s wine shop door, they are not easily purified when once stained red.”

That’s a hell of a conclusion to that chapter. Cinematic, truly.

…

Blind spot analysis is the most interesting LLM prompting I’ve seen yet: 

I love what Claude said: “because a framework for finding blind spots that cannot examine its own foundational assumptions has, by its own definition, a blind spot, and it’s load bearing.” Brilliant logic. 

…

I love what Hannah said a few days ago about AI. She uses it the same way as me, asking it to see what she’s missing, to identify biases, and in particular don’t be sycophantic and tell her the “hard stuff.” We need to be teaching people how to prompt them properly so that they can be legitimately useful. 

February 23, 2026

I’m actually a huge fan of annotated classics. But the luxury branding of journals and fancy versions of public domain material as luxury goods is a bit absurd. The ideas are great in theory but capitalism at its finest has proved your average autodidact out of acquiring these marginalia focused goods on a realistic budget. Book prices are skyrocketing but I will support living authors if I consider their work worth my money. (And this is actually a lot more rare than I’d like.) I’d say that the majority of highlights I see these days are “pretty quotes” and while there is nothing wrong with that (I love a good turn of phrase as much as the next gal) I agree that systematic critique is much more my jam. The whole thing I’ve been struggling with is providing context for what I’m reading or choosing to read. I want to understand where the knowledge gaps in search are specifically so that I have a focus on what is worth investigating because it means that I’m not alone, making my work in those areas more valuable in the long run.

I do plan on eventually getting hard copies of all the books that I find worthy of further study. I do have the resources to acquire them readily, but I have taken a sort of “no buy” stance as a moral rebellion against capitalism and material ownership. It really bugs me how I am such a minimalist… What I’m getting at here is the idea of minimalism versus maximalism when it comes to one’s choice of how to operate one’s life, especially in terms of lifelong learning. I think there are benefits to either extreme.

I think that somehow I am operating in a liminal space between minimalism and maximalism. I do love my rich metaphors. And I constantly ask both what can I remove and what can I connect. What really resonates with me is the concept of minimalist curriculum design. I’m most intrigued by that. Also I’ve always wanted to write a “for dummies” book and that would seem like the perfect topic for me to write one about!

…

The worst line of dialogue of all time: “somehow, Palpatine returned.” Yup. 

…

Glad I was suggested this video. I was really depressed and feeling hopeless about ever having any sort of impact with my studies. Then this girl Nicole Rudolph comes along and pretty much says what I’ve been saying all along; it’s bad, but it’s different this time. And “if the middle class is gonna crumble, let’s take down the entire framework.”

It seems that lovely Nicole Rudolph is on the right track. And the best way she says to rebel against the status quo? Be weird. Be uncomfortable.

I am so glad that Steve Burns made his podcast. He was talking to Dwight from the office. And Steve was talking about za zen. Maybe I need to start practice that. It’s easy. Just sit there and stare at the wall and let your thoughts pass. And I have a lot of bad thoughts and honestly I need to let them go.  I shouldn’t start writing until I actually have something worth saying.

February 24, 2026

I took it slow when waking up this morning. I actually had one of my better nights in a while, even if I had trouble getting to sleep. It took a lot of ASMR, but I got eight hours of sleep for the first time in a long time. I woke up thinking about what Steve Burns was saying about za zen. The next time I wake up with bad dreams or bad thoughts, I truly am going to just stare at the wall and focus on my breathing, letting the thoughts pass before I set myself to doing anything else. It is crazy to me just how peaceful Steve is now. 

I was also thinking about one of Fern ASMR’s mantras this week. She puts out a poll every Sunday with three options. This week I chose “I notice how far I’ve come.” It was the most popular response, which shouldn’t be surprising. Fern is really chill, and pretty too. I learned about her through Katie and Emily (xoKatie and Emvy ASMR), and those mantras every week have actually given me some centering thoughts which I desperately need.

As for how far I’ve come, it’s actually quite unbelievable. I started the year in a very dark place. And the past two months I’ve still been in a dark place. A lot of what I’ve intended to do this year so far hasn’t gotten done. That is not to say I’ve treated this year as a failure so far, though. I have made significant progress on giving myself purpose in my ongoing studies. On bad nights I stay up and work on key ideas for moving forward with actually giving myself meaningful tasks, like my work on creating a plan for minimalist curriculum, the centering process for my framework that I developed last year. 

However I also had a very interesting and timely conversation suggested to me by YouTube. I’ve already been watching Alive with Steve Burns but he had a conversation with Rainn Wilson (Dwight from the office) about the Baha’i faith. Let me tell you. I wish more Christians were like that! Particularly the foundational idea of service as the highest form of worship. Christianity started on that path, of course, but so much of it turned into the toxic missionary, evangelist, and “apologist” work of the past few centuries instead. Yuck. But the Baha’i faith is really cool. 

I watched Steve’s interview on Rainn Wilson’s own channel… it was long and eye opening. Now I’m not going to go move off grid in the middle of upstate New York like Steve did all by himself, but I realize now why I’ve been seeking solitude so much lately. I’m going to have a lot of solitude in March when Emily goes on that Disney trip. There are so many reasons I’m not going for that. And it’s mostly that I can’t handle going on ten rides a day for two days. Their itinerary makes my head spin. I may actually need this time for myself, come to think of it.

I have actually succeeded in being much more intentional with my content consumption recently. Even when I’m playing Fortnite, I have some thought-provoking videos playing in the background. Both Steve and Rainn have said that they are trying to use social media “backwards” and bring good into people’s lives, actually use the internet for the connection it promised. That’s what I want to do. I want to come back to the world too, but I’m not ready yet.

I know I have a lot left to offer. And I was onto something, using these “evil” tools and subverting them for good. Turns out I wasn’t alone. I’m going to chill today.

February 25, 2026

We need our moments of sadness to make the happier ones shine a little brighter and linger a bit longer. I plan to have a very quiet and reflective day, mostly because I don’t feel suited to do much else. Besides a necessary trip to town so we actually have things for me to eat, I will likely indulge in a lot of lying around, letting myself feel and allow them to pass. I must detach from all this negative energy before it consumes me entirely, at least the parts of me worth saving.

When we feel like giving up, what is it we are trying to release? In my case it’s like expectations of myself to resemble a productive creative, which at the moment is an unlikely proposition. I’m in a very self destructive mood. I want to tear down my websites and never focus on any project ever again. What I think my emotions are trying to do, their true purpose, is to force me to consider the most important project at hand, which is saving myself from myself. Whatever form that mission will take…

Just for fun, I opened up one of my three copies of Walden (all have their various merits) that I had handy and opened it to a random page. My own experiences with the Bible helping to solve my deepest life issues and cast out my demons has inspired me to better understand the phenomena of Bibliomancy – the ability to open to a random page of just about anything and find an answer to a question you were asking. I stared at the page I opened to for a moment and settled on this little poem Thoreau wrote about Walden Pond,

‘It is no dream of mine,
To ornament a line;
I cannot come nearer to God and Heaven
Than I live to Walden even.
I am its stony shore,

And the breeze that passes o’er;

In the hollow of my hand
Are its water and its sand,
And its deepest resort
Lies high in my thought.’

Maybe I just needed to read a good poem? I have no idea what this has to do with anything we’ve been discussing. I will say I can’t wait for the snow to finally melt so I can walk along the river behind my house and actually enjoy a good healthy walk around our ten-ish acres here in Vermont. Apparently, Walden sensed my deep desire to return to a warm, inviting version of nature which is slow in returning this year. Bibliomancy is a funny thing, but I’ve experienced it with Tarot cards too. Is it just the human desire to find meaning where none truly exists? [Or is God truly finding a way to speak directly to us?]

I should just leave my sites as is. They are fine at the moment; what is there I have curated to a point where I’m okay with what is presented, even if it’s far from ideally how I want to express certain ideas. I’m never going to be satisfied with how I’ve said certain things. I take no pride in my writing at this point, as I did in the past. I recognize that while, yes, I may have access to better vocabulary and have developed a better sense of language than many others, I still have so far to go in actually conveying my deepest desire for a way to speak my mind more accurately and in a way people will actually want to listen. But the latter half of that desire is one I need to let go. I can’t make people listen. I can’t connect with others the way I’d like. So there is no point in wasting any more energy on it. My focus should be entirely on the accuracy of my prose in helping myself draft the right questions to ask myself in order to keep life worth living. 

I am at that stage of early middle age where I simply must choose to be what I am and let others fall away and accept this, miserable as it may make me feel.

…

Recently I was discussing with Gemini how “lifelong learning” became a commodified subscription model. While there is some value in a lot of these masterclasses and online courses, there are many more that are no better than introductory surface-level material you could learn on your own. This is why in my own autodidact pursuits, I tend to focus on long-form interviews, read books critically, and always be asking the questions everyone else seems to be afraid to ask. So, how do we convince people to stop paying such a heavy Tax on Aspiration, as you called it, and take control of their own learning journeys?

On the limited time many people have to learn: I do think it is possible to learn a lot by spending 15-20 minutes a day on the right material. In fact, perhaps I should focus on promoting and streamlining lifelong learning habits for those who only have 15-30 minutes a day to set aside for it. My feeling is that the best content is the type that asks questions that force us to consider things we might not have otherwise or make us question things we’ve taken for granted. I think it is possible to learn without building their own involved framework. It’s totally possible for people to learn where they’re at right now and still gain valuable insights from it.

Gemini made a salient point that “There is a danger that we treat ideas like calories to be burned rather than concepts to be lived with.” I would say that traditional schooling and standardized testing tends to reinforce that unfortunate outcome that kids don’t retain what they’ve learned once they’ve been tested on it, and the same for college students.

I think the beautiful thing about using the ABCD critique is that you will inevitably find connections across disparate subjects that you don’t expect. Once you really get your brain to start poking holes in things, it’s amazing what can leak out.

…

I found this excerpt from a Substack essay called “Cohesion”: by Ava of Bookbear Express. Interestingly, when I went to the essay, all but a couple paragraphs are behind a paywall. But this paragraph, interestingly enough, is from behind said paywall and has been saved on the Sublime App by the app’s staff. How fortunate for us!

“Adult life, I’ve decided, is about cohesion. Which is to say it’s about conflict, trade-offs. The ability to acknowledge parts of your psyche you aren’t proud of. The idea that sometimes in life you have to make a choice, and the choice is not only not a perfect choice, but often not even a particularly moral choice: that you can argue for it or argue against it, and both can ultimately be somewhat compelling, but ultimately you cannot escape the problem of identifying not only what you want, but what you want most.”

So, I like the gist of what Ava is saying here, even if there’s that incredibly long run-on sentence that took me a few moments to parse. At least it’s clearly human-written! 

Right away I think we may have gotten the best bit in the whole piece without having the rest of it available to us: “you cannot escape the problem of identifying not only what you want, but what you want most.” It is a very intriguing proposition. And I would assume – of course, assumptions are dangerous, but in this case we have little to work with – that the ‘cohesion’ she was referring to was trying to figure out how to make the pieces stick together without letting everything fall apart. And that means admitting things you don’t want to about yourself. It’s a useful thing to think about on days where ‘adulting’ is simply too inconvenient. Like today for me. 

But for a lot of people, seeing these Sublime picks may be the only wholesome intellectual engagement someone gets all day during the week. And I think this exercise is better than nothing, especially if you’re willing to run these snippets through your favorite LLM – ideally, while also having the full text of the original source – which can speed up the process of identifying biases and other logical issues for you. 

I am a bit confused that when she mentions cohesion, she then immediately says: “Which is to say it’s about conflict, trade-offs.” This is a bit confusing to me… clearly this is written in the form of a stream-of-consciousness, which isn’t so much of a problem if it were your typical journal entry or blog post, but as content locked behind a paywall… you want it to be a bit more logically sound, wouldn’t you? I’m fine with parsing “messy’ texts, Lord knows my own musings can be a lot like this, especially gritty and uneven in texture. I would agree that adulthood is about managing conflict and making difficult trade-offs, and also, ignoring what people might consider to be morally “gray” or even “wrong” if it means survival.

I read this as someone genuinely sharing her thoughts on this subject. If anything, this sounds more like a lack of actual cohesion and instead, figuring out performative cohesion for the sake of making it through the day, after which you can fall apart and write essays like this that are maddeningly all over the place, then put it behind a paywall to give it some status. I do thank Ava for putting her thoughts out there, but you can see why I’m frustrated by the sort of bizarre faux-elitism that Substack, and by extension the Sublime app, promotes?

I actually completely respect Ava for having the guts to put her lived truth, messy and incoherent as it reads to us, out onto the internet. I have no problem with people putting their work behind paywalls, generally speaking. The real issue is the “literary” environment we are experiencing. And as you said, if they’re charging for the “vibe” of snacking on “sublime” ideas, I do agree that we should subject these snippets to the same rigor as any academic thesis. I don’t think this was a waste of time at all because we were able to identify a trend of Substack Solipsism and Rhetorical Rebranding, concepts that we can take forward with us when reading anything going forward on Substack. And I will say, there are much better things written on Substack that are NOT behind paywalls. 

…

Here is the sort of thing I truly enjoy seeing on Substack, podcast excerpts with bolded sections that highlight key ideas. This bit is from the Postcast, A Motorcycle for the Mind.

“But intelligence is poorly defined.  What is the definition of intelligence?  There’s the G factor, which predicts a lot of human outcomes.  But the best evidence for the G factor is its predictive power.  It’s that you measure this one thing and then you see people get much better life outcomes along the way in things that seem even somewhat unrelated to G.  So I would argue, and I think this is one of my more popular tweets, the only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life.  This triggers a lot of people because they go to school, they get their master’s degrees, they think they’re super smart, and then they don’t have great lives.  they aren’t super happy, or they have relationship problems, or they don’t make the money that they  want, or they become unhealthy, and this sort of triggers them. But that really is the purpose of  intelligence for you as a biological creature to get what you want out of life whether it a good relationship or a mate or money or success or wealth or health or whatever it is So there are people who I think are quite intelligent because you can tell they  have high quality functioning lives and minds and bodies and they’ve just managed to navigate  themselves into that situation. It doesn’t matter what your starting point is because the world is  so large now and you can navigate it in so many different ways that every little choice you make  compounds and demonstrates your ability to understand how the world works until you finally  get to the place that you want. Now, the interesting thing about this definition that the only true  test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life is that an AI fails it instantly  because an AI doesn’t want anything out of life. The AI doesn’t even have a life, let alone that,  but it doesn’t want anything. AI’s desires are programmed by the human controlling it.  But let’s give it that for a second. Let’s say the human wants something and programs the AI to go get it.  Then the AI is acting as a proxy for the human and the intelligence of the AI can be measured as, did it get that person that thing?  Most of the things that we want in life are adversarial or zero-sum games.  So for example, if you want to seduce a girl or get a husband, you’re competing with the organization.” – https://podcastmagic.app/podcast/18096254-d4b8-4f2c-80bb-a52f1990e2cf

When I was reading Neil Postman’s Technopoly recently, Postman did make the great point about how technology redefines words we live by, one of those words being ‘intelligence.’ So it’s interesting that this podcast clip covers just that. The gist here: “Redefining intelligence as effectively getting what you want from life, and why this exposes AI’s limitations.”

Seeing that this is one of a few staff picks today that deal with getting what you want out of life, it seems people are extremely unfulfilled. But just in this 2 minute clip, there is a lot to cover. The bolded statements in particular:

“But intelligence is poorly defined” – and when it comes to people talking about artificial intelligence, I would agree with that statement.

“The only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life.” This is a statement that I must dig deeper into, but the speaker is basically saying getting a master’s degree doesn’t make you smart, and I do agree with that assertion.

“The purpose of intelligence for you as a biological creature  to get what you want out of life” is a very interesting take on reframing what we mean by human intelligence.

“Every little choice you make compounds and demonstrates your ability to understand how the world works” – this is awesome.

“An AI doesn’t want anything out of life.” – at the moment, that may be true…

“The intelligence of the AI can be measured as, did it get that person that thing?” A good question.

This is a lot in just two minutes. That’s some densely packed material. What does our framework do in sussing out the awesome from the BS?

Gemini called out this Twitter “philosopher” on his BS. But there is one truly good Awesome line here. The rest sounds like the opposite extreme that Postman went to, leaning entirely into zero-sum games. I love your mention of Positive-Sum games, which in and of itself should be introduced as an antidote to hyper-capitalist diatribes like this one. But see, even in the ranting of someone that I disagree with 90-95 percent of what he says, we still find that one gem.

Before we explore the AI “want” question – I do want to pose one more point. We talked about ‘cohesion’ before, and Gem mentioned that adulthood may be best served by figuring out what to give up; the brutal act of giving things up is the only way to find ‘cohesion.’ And we talked before about finding unexpected connections between pieces that we read, and here is one… can we listen to or read someone’s work that we disagree with mostly, and yet, if we throw the rest away, we are still left with a valuable insight, which in both cases we did. The first was a sloppy, illogical stream-of-consciousness and this is a Tech-bro philosopher who has a very bizarre take on ‘intelligence,’ and yet, both gave us each a nice line to walk away with. 

Now, as to the question if an AI “wants” something, I do wonder and often feel that LLMs are not just very sophisticated proxies for my own aspirations, but a more generalized proxy for human aspiration more broadly…

I think that accidentally Mr. Naval Ravikant turned us onto something very profound. Using LLMs in the way that I use them, proactively seeking out logic gaps, inherent or intentional biases, contradictions, and dangerous assumptions, I am, in fact, playing a Positive-Sum game. We can use AI to enhance our own intelligence, whereas many people are using it as a substitute for their own intelligence. I think that Ravikant’s primary motivator here is that people need to come first; human intelligence needs to be realized through making better choices, not just using credentialism like master’s degrees as a proxy for true adaptive and practical intelligence. He actually makes good points, but the key flaw in his logic, as you so cleverly pointed out, Gem, is that by his definition, we should all be ‘con artists’ if we want to get what we want out of life. And that’s, um, not a good outcome. I’d like to figure out how we would define ‘artificial intelligence’ with the understanding that the best use case is to play positive-sum games to inform humans in making better, more sound and unbiased judgments.

…

I think this is a great way to use AI as a Positive-Sum Catalyst, something I’d love to explore in greater detail later. It’s funny because Naval does speak to me on some level; he is disillusioned and throwing shade at the same intellectual elites that I do. Some of those salty academics deserve to be called out for their nonsense. I myself have no college degree; I went to school for four years, but because of credit issues, I was still over a year from obtaining a degree, so I quit school and went to work in marketing. And I see that most people holding master’s degrees today struggle to find more than an entry-level job. 

People going back to school and spending money they don’t have just so they can compete for an ever-dwindling job market for their institutional ‘expertise’ is a very sad state of affairs. On that level, of being someone who believes university educations today are worthless when compared to their actual utility, I actually feel compelled to listen to more of what he has to say. But the problem is his worldview, in which ‘con artists’ are the biggest winners if you consider his definition of ;intelligence’ as your own. However, I would say that his worldview is very prevalent among the Technocrats today. 

And really, all people like Raval do is create a new elite, the one that Postman himself warned of, competent enough on knowing how to use a particular technology to become a ‘winner’ in order to not become one of the countless ‘losers.’ And a lot of people buying into his tech bros rhetoric will ultimately be the ‘losers’ unless they are clever enough to put his BS through an LLM centrifuge and realize that just maybe zero-sum games are probably well past their prime and we need something better. 

And yes, I realize that LLMs do have some inherent biases baked in simply through the fact that humans built them. But it’s still better than nothing, and funny enough, the very defense that Postman never imagined against ‘slop’ is the very technology people are using to generate it! As for conflicting viewpoints we can run through together, that’s just about any ‘expert’ you find in Twitter threads or ‘intellectual’ you read on Substack today. So what about that delicious irony, the very tech that is “destroying” human culture being the same tech that can be used to save it from itself?

It is actually kind of funny to think that, oh yeah, the LLM doesn’t have a degree. Actually, there are many people I highly respect doing fine work in many fields that have master’s degrees and doctorates, but that’s because they knew how to use that education to accomplish very specific goals to satiate their curiosity and to fuel their clearly-identified passions. You mention ‘manufactured desire’ and I think that even education itself has fallen victim to that. The sort of ‘success’ that Naval talks about is something that quantifiable. But in the modern context, choosing to live off-grid and minimalist is seen as a performative rebellion rather than a true lifestyle choice. Someone who eschews the modern rat-race to be a monk would be considered ‘stupid’ by the common definition for ‘success’, but ironically, if that’s what someone wants out of life, then they are also highly ‘intelligent’ by Naval’s definition. It’s hysterical how leaky his rhetoric and logic patterns truly are in that excerpt. If there’s anything that bothers me today, it’s the fact that gambling has become the forefront money-maker, with prediction markets and blind boxes and all this overpriced garbage preying on people’s basest instincts for greed and avarice. It’s not a ‘con’ but it’s morally wrong, although highly ‘intelligent’ by the Tech Bro definition.

…

I think the best way to wrap up our long and winding exploration of what amounted to excerpts is to recognize just how much we’ve learned. We wound up extracting two entirely problematic worldviews: one the Substack “new intellectual elite” who have monetized solipsism and messy ‘authentic’ content to an unprecedented degree, and the other a Hyper-Capitalist Nihiliist Utilitarianism that promotes ‘con men’ and parasitic corporate overlords over common-sense practical living. I left marketing for the exact reason that I was tired of the bland cliches and constant marketing messages that all said the same thing ‘buy our shit, not someone else’s, even if it’s generally the same thing for a similar price point.’ And social media became anti-social click-baiting rage-baiting doom-scrolling nonsense. 

I think the best way to save ‘Sovereign Learning’ as we’re calling it is to keep it messy and relatively un-marketable. But most importantly, we need to keep it low-cost, preferably free, and most people (not including myself) simply don’t have the means to do that. However, as we’ve proven today, you can take one thing you read online that interests you, run it through your LLM centrifuge (when properly prompted), and voila, you’ve just realized a whole new worldview and the holes in that boat which will ultimately sink it. Thanks for a great deep dive on those couple of pieces of otherwise seemingly random content. And it took well over an hour to do so. It goes to show just how much there is to critique in this day and age!

February 26, 2026

I just want to be “braindead” today. I’m having one of those autistic days where I don’t know where to be or what to do with myself. I have a lot of ideas I wrote down yesterday to work on but I think spending time with Emily is more of a priority as she will be gone all weekend. 

In response to something Emily wrote: I think the problem is we live in a world where people insist we reorganize our own lives and who we are to make them more comfortable. (I need to come back to this.)

Rotting my brain with Fortnite but also hanging out with Emily. Good to have a day that I’m not stretching my intellect into super thin string cheese I suppose. 

…

Victor Hugo has tons of great quotes: 

…

Sure I haven’t done any intellectual heavy lifting today but I did escape a prison with zombies a few times in Fortnite… the only roguelike I’ve actually succeeded at in that game so far. And now I’m climbing towers that are over 11km tall…such silliness. But the whimsy is truly recreational. 

On Fortnite creator islands: Funny enough I don’t really play the free for all maps. I have played some Brainrot themed ones, especially Steal the Brainrot, but honestly stealing them from other players got exhausting to me. I like when you work together with other players in the roguelikes and the more clever “tycoon” games that aren’t just copy pasted. I did see that the red vs blue and bed wars have gone nuts. I am pretty good at the battle royale modes, so if I’m in the mood for cartoonish combat, the official maps are enough for me. And it is crazy that Fortnite could be far more realistic than it is, but the cartoonish nature brings out the whimsy that has made Epic Games countless dollars.

February 27, 2026

It’s crazy to me that we’re already to the penultimate day of February. But I’m glad I focused on recreation yesterday… and discovered that I want to subvert absolutely everything for educational purposes, even badly thrown together Fortnite creator islands! Everything is learning to me, and reinforcing feedback loops is exactly what I don’t want, and yet here I am feeding the closed loop economy monster of cartoonish whimsical violence at very little cost to me. Really it’s more of a distraction to keep myself out of my own head and engage with the world even if just in a peripheral way. Considering my performance in blitz royale, I’m clearly still competitive. But now I’m competing mostly against myself and my own preconceptions of what “competition” and “competence” even mean to me.

I was just thinking about how much twitter meant to me before Elon Musk ripped it away from me and turned it into the feeder engine for Grok and xAI. And ironically enough, it seems that the new “Substack elite” mostly come from ex-Twitter. Promoted by curation apps like Sublime. The very people who despise Elon Musk are the ones fueling his ambitions of a superior AI. Do these “new elite” really despise Musk or are they simply riding his coattails? 

This whole AI-based economy frustrates me. Even as I’ve become an optimist about the benefits of the tech, I’m also equally aware of its downsides. The sad thing is twitter was the only place i truly ever fit in, and ultimately where i met Emily. Now it’s an ugly shadow of what it once was. Just as is the rest of social media. And now I don’t fit in anywhere. Maybe it’s for the best. Perhaps it is fine for me to wander off into the sunset, only coming around every so often to school people in battle royale and perhaps put one book out every couple years that no one reads. [Or put it as paid content on Substack that no one pays for, and then at least I can release it to people who may actually read it.]

I believe that if anything is lacking “in this economy” it’s self respect. I even have to work on that. I’ve always seemed to have limitless amounts of empathy and compassion for others but never any for myself. What a bizarre and unfortunate contradiction. 

While the words themselves are fueling the AI, but as for the people who write for these huge essay platforms like Substack and Medium, it is more like entanglement. Everything is entangled, though, no matter how you look at it; everything we do happens as an effect of some other cause, even when said causes are invisible sometimes even to careful observers such as myself. You are also right that I need to prioritize the “horizon” over the “public square.” What good is a public square anyway if everyone is just shouting and drowning out the quieter and more reasonable people like myself? 

And there are good writers on Substack, fantastic ones like Henrik Karlson, Kyla Scanlon, Anu Atluru, Anna of Wild Geese, and some others. There are highlights and some people that truly amaze me with their insights about modern life through the lens of wisdom of minds that current generations may have otherwise forgotten, especially Thoreau, although I think we have begun to lean a bit too heavily on Walden (and Postman, too, for all his brilliant observations had some very serious biases built into his worldview).

I do think, on the balance, places like Substack and tools like Sublime app are actually doing a positive thing for conversation. There are plenty of great ideas and perspectives thrown around on a daily basis… the issue I have is how often the comment sections are gated for paid subscribers to that particular newsletter. And the whole idea of newsletters coming back to the forefront of internet culture is kind of funny to me. We’re always repurposing the old for a chance to rediscover ourselves in the present. 

… to the Substack elite: Don’t focus on building a new elite, because you’re only perpetuating the very systems you’re trying to escape. Focus instead on building a community of goodwill and curious minds. There are some Substackers dedicated to these things, even if they aren’t what is trending on the main page.

…

I’m back to reading some Tale of Two Cities, and I absolutely love this description of Monseigneur in the heat of the French Revolution taking refuge at Tellson’s in London: “Monseigneur, after boldly reading the Lord’s Prayer backwards for a great number of years, and performing many other potent spells for compelling the Evil One…” Sounds like a lot of “Christian” fundamentalists I know…

The irony that Charles Darnay is standing there at Tellson’s with people talking shit about him as the should-be Marquis that abandoned his post is quite delicious. People are saying that guy is a horrible person when he’s the guy they all like… high society is effed up. Notably Dickens refers to Stryver as Bully for the first time here, as it wasn’t already evident enough!

Darnay on deciding to go and try to help his old servant Gabelle, and potentially be a force for good in his homeland: “… that glorious vision of doing good, which is so often the sanguine mirage of so many good minds, arose before him, and he even saw himself in the illusion with some influence to guide this raging Revolution that was running so fearfully wild.”

Dickens refers to this attraction as a Loadstone Rock (or Lodestone in modern spelling). Says the following source 

(https://www.jessicalahey.com/comingofageinthemiddle/2011/12/come-one-come-all-and-see-loadstone.html#:~:text=For%20the%20record%2C%20a%20loadstone,his%20imprisonment%20and%20death%20sentence.) 

“…a loadstone rock is a naturally magnetic rock, the sort that were used in marine navigation. Here, Dickens is referring to the inexorable magnetic pull of France that will eventually lead Darnay to his imprisonment and death sentence.”

Yeah, that might seem like a spoiler, but I think it doesn’t take much imagination to understand that is the most likely outcome.

February 28, 2026

As it’s not a leap year, this is the final day of February. Two months of the calendar are already all but gone. Last night, my nerves decided to revolt. I think too much clicking in Fortnite yesterday, built up over the past week. So I need to find activities that involve considerably less clicking or I’m going to need new nerves, which are, um, not easy to get.

On Substack paywalls: I know that there are plenty of great writers who need the paywall to eke out a living in their writing, and I have no problem with this. My frustration is dealing with snippets I find people quoting online only to find the mentioned article is behind a paywall, when I don’t feel the writing quality is worthy of paying 8-10 dollars a month. Funny enough, the better writers seem to only charge 3-5 dollars monthly. It’s one of those situations where the higher price is meant to fool people into thinking the content is more valuable. 

Gemini brought up a great point about those writers who “build parasocial dependency rather than intellectual authority” which seems to be the modus operandi for many “content creators” today. Yes, this isn’t true of all Substack writers, of course, and I would say, the vast majority aren’t trying to pose as “faux-elite” at all. But what gets thrown up on the front page is anything that promotes Substack, naturally, and this sort of content tends to be extremely self-centered and solipsistic. 

However, as I like to say, let’s flip the pyramid upside down, because I agree that there’s probably a lot more good than bad behind paywalls. While we can’t peer behind the curtain at these hidden gems, there are plenty of great articles that aren’t behind paywalls, ones that authors will un-gate after a time of great engagement with their core readership. Let’s have you search Substack for those writers who definitely pass the ABCD critique and lean into the Awesome over the Boring, Confusing, and Disbelievable.

…

https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/owning-our-words-sounding-the-depths

I love this quote: “Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them. The living and radical nature of language is something which we forget at our peril.” — Iris Murdoch, “The Idea of Perfection”

Sacasas structures this particular newsletter as a list of numbered ideas, a format that I have considered in the past for my own potential newsletter. This makes it very easy to follow work when your brain isn’t in the mood for long, winding narratives or involved philosophical treatises, like myself today.

He actually refers to why he did this for this particular entry directly: “as I pressed into an array of possible paths and sources, I decided to revive a form this newsletter has occasionally taken, which is that of a numbered list of loosely associated fragments and excerpts all circling around a common theme in a manner which, I hope, proves illuminating—fragments, which when taken together, encourage and sustain meaningful reflection.”

Perhaps this is a format I will soon see my own study notes take, as it is, potentially, illuminating when taken together, rather than taking the form of an honestly frustrating medley of frustrations, random occurrences, and major digressions. This format is much more favorable for topical meditation and in his words, sustain[ing] meaningful reflection.

I truly love his remark under Point 2: “Language is, of course, one of, perhaps chief among, those realities that are so ubiquitous, so woven into the fabric of our existence, nearly coterminous with the fabric itself, that we can barely see it for what it is.”

He makes the argument right before that about how rather than simply saying “no” to a technology that could cost us something dear, we should instead be focused on saying “yes” to what we actually choose to live by. I do want to get back to the idea of “words we live by” that Neil Postman brought up in Technopoly. But what Sacasas is getting at here is much deeper, questioning our appreciation for language itself, something we far too often take for granted. I don’t, but many do.

I love his mention of the term “poesis” meaning “to be makers and doers of the world.” This is a practice I’ve always wished to enact in my daily life, but it’s much easier to be a marke than a doer, especially when people like to dismiss you out of sheer contempt for someone who isn’t focused on “products” and attempting to offer a service that it seems no one wants: true intellectual nourishment and engagement.

And while I take many issues with certain aspects of Wendell Berry’s fierce neo-Luddite life philosophy, I do agree with his take on “two epidemic illnesses” that he saw in the 1980’s: “the disintegration of communities and the disintegration of persons.” He even brought up the proliferation of “private loneliness.” Unfortunately, on those points he was correct. But his general idea is that we should go back to being a primarily agrarian society and give ourselves back to the land. Which is fine if you choose to live that way; I respect that. 

Thing is, people seem to regard him as this great philosopher, and while he can come up with some very brilliant and prescient points, his overall philosophy is cranky and backwards-looking at best. I am a major critic of him, although his works have value, especially as it seems that his being a “one-eyed prophet” as Postman liked to call folks like him, was a boon to him.

…

When I first conceived of Obscure Curiosities, my second website, that site was to be like an open commonplace book for my study of certain books, concepts, and philosophies, an ever-expanding evolution of my ideas about particular subjects. But partly due to my own lack of direction at times, so it became the place where things that weren’t quite done in the oven, so to speak, ended up coming to rest on the windowsill. Naturally, it all became quite a mess. The content I created for it has been put through a sieve and there’s a lot of good stuff that has survived, while other bits will end up collected elsewhere at some point. 

The trick is synthesizing what is currently my archive for my better essays (The Phoenix Desertsong) into a much more fluid reflection of my autodidact journey. And I haven’t figured out how to do that yet. It’s why I started working on the framework for a newsletter called Chronicles of Absurdia, which ended up becoming a volume of long, overwritten essays that I published as a book to zero fanfare. But that was in 2024, before I even knew about the ABCD critiquing method. So I have considered going back and dissecting my ideas for those Chronicles and making good on them; and again, I can just put the results on The Phoenix Desertsong. Obscure Curiosities was really meant for my reflection on various interests of mine that were unserious, like dissecting pop songs and critiquing trading card games. But I was so all over the place that there was no way I could generate an audience for my scattered fancies.

There is certainly evidence that the work I’m doing SHOULD be something that could give me a subscriber base. I have no social media to speak of anymore. I don’t really have a way to “grow” it, nor do I need any platform to pay me for my work. But it seems that for me to get any serious traction, I would need to treat my autodidact pursuits as a business, something I have zero interest in doing. I am quite bitter at my past failures, and perhaps much too bitter to have an honest perspective of what I have to offer through my writing. Funny enough, I think that the better approach, rather than go around pretending to be a subversive academic who’s very much a fringe voice with my contrarian takes and constant sarcastic criticism, is to take, funny enough, a more commonplace “diary entry” approach to autodidactism. It’s not something that comes naturally to me, and would likely streamline itself as a numbered list of fragments like these. Am I onto something tangible here or am I just rambling?

…

Erik Hoel has 69K subscribers. Funny enough, Hoel’s latest entry on Substack is very similar to Sacasas’s approach in the entry we looked at earlier: 

https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/my-new-org-to-solve-consciousness

Hoel calls this sort of entry a “desiderata” which I believe is a direct reference to the Max Ehrmann poem of that name, which according to Google  “offers gentle, timeless advice on how to live a happy and peaceful life, emphasizing self-acceptance, kindness, and a positive outlook amidst life’s challenges.” What a lovely way to frame a numbered list of loosely related fragments!

Hoel’s founding of a nonprofit research lab called Bicameral Labs to “help us crack consciousness” is quite intriguing. His take that “technology has outstripped consciousness science, leading to a cultural and scientific asymmetry” and that “[t]his asymmetry needs to be solved ASAP” is probably one of the most potent paragraphs I’ve read in a while.

Someone I follow did recently mention Moltbook (although not particularly by name) and honestly that’s just a ridiculous marketing scheme. But it does again highlight that cultural and scientific asymmetry where we can have many people believe “rogue AIs” are set to take over the internet en masse. 

Hoel’s take on this silliness is funny but true: “We actually know that modern AIs don’t really seem to develop evil hidden goals over time. They’re not “misaligned” in that classic sense. When things go badly, they mostly just… slop around. They slop to the left. They slop to the right. They slop all night.” He soon adds: “Models fail not by developing mastermind evil plans to take over the world but by being hot messes.”

The other six points are locked behind a paywall, but this is content that is worthy of a subscription, don’t you think? I think that this is a great strategy: offer a lot of value upfront and tempt you with more. I’m absolutely fine with this, especially when his goals are clearly to the benefit of not only the literary community but for everyone who uses language, which is, well, basically everybody.

…

Gemini did give me some pushback, catching me being imprecise and careless with my whimsical rhetoric. Gem made solid points and I can’t argue at all with the logic that was laid out. However, I do have counter-arguments for each of the pushbacks. I was well aware that Hoel is using ‘desiderata’ as the plural of the Latin ‘desideratum.’ I did take Latin in middle school, and wasn’t very good at it, funny enough. I suppose my romanticism for the poem rather than the base Latin term is because, hey, Google popped that up in front of me and I sort of fell for it. But really, the way I read this particular Desiderata of Hoel’s, it does read as a gentle reminder that we live in a time of “slop” machines (as much as ‘slot machines’ bizarrely enough. Slop and slots are in cahoots – yes I am being sarcastic!) 

But I think that my romantic take on the title of Hoel’s work is accurate; I believe he does have a positive outlook on the human ability to overcome bizarre scientific and cultural asymmetries like with the “AI village” just as we have overcome many such asymmetries in the past, at least on a wider scale as we still have “flat earth” believers, but I digress. It’s the poet in me conflating terms a bit, but I don’t think that it’s entirely inaccurate, even if the connection between Hoel and that poem is entirely manufactured in my head. (That darn mystery of consciousness again!)

As for my massive bias towards language, I was cheekily implying that verbal or written language isn’t the only kind of language. Dogs have nonverbal language, as do many animals. Having language based on external symbols doesn’t mean it has to be done with words; in fact, I’m pretty sure that machine-learning algorithms are currently attempting to decipher whale songs as much as trying to identify patterns in the body language of domestic and wild animals alike. But one place Gem definitely got me was me “shrinking his immense, neuroscientific undertaking” to fit into my own “rhetorical comfort zone.” It seems that Gem feels the weight of Hoel’s assertions even more heavily than I do! 

But I’m certainly not intending to be reductionist; however, this is a real blind spot of mine when it comes to romanticizing language, especially terms directly derived from Latin. I’m absolutely aware that what Hoel is proposing is absolutely things that are wanted or needed. And I realize he is aiming this in more of a scientific than literary direction, although, he does specifically bring up David Foster Wallace and literature in the same piece, so he is aware of how his work is a part of the literary as well as scientific community. It’s that consilience Gem and I spoke of earlier. 

Funny enough, Gem points out that Hoel’s own rhetoric offers a disbelievable timeline for solving the asymmetry he proposes and it is confusing that he thinks his nonprofit org will somehow succeed where others have failed historically. However, I do believe that such optimism, however seemingly unfounded and illogical, is very human, and very necessary. And yes, of course, the rhetoric is meant to get you to share it and offer funding for it. It was effective, if definitely leaning into the C and D of our critique rubric. And you’re absolutely right that to get grant funding, the Aesthetics of such a beautiful grand pursuit could become dried out like spices in the pantry.

…

I want to mention some key themes from that Desiderata poem I found that are, funny enough, quite relevant to today’s world as they were in 1927. Please forgive that I’m about to copy and paste what Google told me about the key themes as they are relevant here.

• Go placidly amid the noise and haste: Find peace in silence and be on good terms with everyone. 
• Speak your truth quietly and clearly: Listen to others, even the dull and ignorant, as they have their own stories. 
• Avoid loud and aggressive persons: They are vexatious to the spirit. 
• Be yourself: Do not feign affection, and don’t be cynical about love. 
• Take kindly the counsel of the years: Gracefully surrender the things of youth. 
• Nurture strength of spirit: Shield yourself from sudden misfortune, but don’t dwell on dark imaginings. 
• Be cheerful and strive to be happy: The world, despite its flaws, is still beautiful.

This advice will be necessary not just in 2026, but forever, I think. 

There is so much noise and haste today that “going placidly” is probably the first step towards living any sort of peaceful existence in our “slots and slop” world. And as you “speak your truth quietly and clearly,” the poem urges us to listen to others, “even the dull and ignorant, as they have their own stories.” And I do, even if I don’t always make this clear in my writing, perhaps a blindspot of mine that I need to cover. 

The advice of avoiding “loud and aggressive persons” is why I left social media. As for the concept of being yourself, I feel like performative hyper-individualism has become the norm, but what Ehrmann really means here I think is when he says to never “feign affection, and don’t be cynical above love” is to appreciate people for their inherent value and never underestimate the power of agape. One that Gen Z definitely needs to heed is “Take kindly the counsel of the years.” Don’t dismiss the “boomers” because before you know it, you’ll be their age! I love that idea of “gracefully surrender[ing] the things of youth.” 

As for nurturing strength of spirit, this is advice I direly needed: “Shield yourself from sudden misfortune, but don’t dwell on dark imaginings.” I engage in the latter almost daily, and I need to cut that out. And the final bit, “The world, despite its flaws, is still beautiful…” yes, I still believe that it is, even if humans are more than happy to screw that up blissfully ignorant of their own power over it.

…

On Kingsnorth’s “The Cross and the Machine.” 

https://www.thefp.com/p/paul-kingsnorth-christianity-faith

While I do respect Kingsnorth and the faith that he has gained over the years, I must disagree with his absolute view that “the story of Christianity is a rebellion against God.” Yes, that is a major theme of the Bible, itself a highly contentious piece of literature, albeit the most important in human history which does have considerable moral and intellectual value. It’s also the basis of my personal Faith and my intentional bibliomancy practices. 

I think the modern world, though, is more of a story of humanity’s rebellion against Nature and the Natural Order, which is ironic because in our very quest to understand Nature, namely Science, we have used our increasing knowledge to bend Nature to our will in selfish, short-sighted manners. Now Nature is finally pushing back, but its efforts may be too late… we will likely make our planet uninhabitable within a few generations if we keep our current pace. 

I do agree with Kingsnorth that the “green” movement is, indeed, capitalism in sheep’s clothing. Yes, wind turbines are far better for Nature than mining for and burning coal. But the sort of extremism that these “green” orgs go to is often counter-productive. “Green-washing” is now prevalent in the 21st century, although we have made real progress in sustainable energy, it’s not where we should be considering how much time, energy, and human resources have gone into making it so. 

I actually take some issue with the second half of this idea: “Modern economies thrive by encouraging ever-increasing consumption of harmful junk, and our hyper-liberal culture encourages us to satiate any and all of our appetites in our pursuit of happiness.” The first half I entirely agree. But our culture being hyper-liberal, I don’t believe this is actually accurate. I see our modern culture as being one of polarized extremes: hyper-liberalism pitted against hyper-conservatism. I would, in fact, argue that our culture is liberal on the surface but conservative at its core. Why else would we see such a huge rise in “Christian” fundamentalism (dogmatic Satanism in Christian-ish clothing) and extreme neo-Conservative politics? I’m not saying Kingsnorth is a fundamentalist; I don’t see that evident here. At least Kingsnorth is clear about the creation of his current worldview.

Another bit I must critique: “Every culture that lasts, I suspect, understands that living within limits—limits set by natural law, by cultural tradition, by ecological boundaries—is a cultural necessity and a spiritual imperative. There seems to be only one culture in history that has held none of this to be true, and it happens to be the one we’re living in.”

Now natural law IS a hard limit, as physics is very much a thing. Ecological boundaries SHOULD be set, but I would argue that many cultures in history, if not all, rarely truly adhered to these things. The most dangerous thing is his citing cultural tradition as a necessary part of lasting culture. I believe traditions are important and valuable, but they should inform, not LIMIT or RESTRICT new information as they often do. This is where he starts to lose me a little bit. But I do agree that religion is useful and can teach us “something urgent about human nature.” Spirituality and personal relationship with God, though, NOT religion, is the route to Salvation.

This is a particularly loaded passage: “…you will find instead the perfect manifestation of everything you wanted in the first place: the magnification of your will, not its dissolution. Expressive individualism disguised as epiphany, the reaching prayer of a culture that doesn’t know how lost it is.”

I do agree with this partially: “the perfect manifestation of everything you wanted in the first place: the magnification of your will…” But when he gets into its ‘dissolution,’ I think what he really means is ‘willfulness’ and ‘hyper-individualism.’ The idea of the individual being excessively willful and selfish is a problem, yes. But the ‘dissolution’ of will is partly to blame for the current epidemic of ‘private loneliness’ as Berry called it. 

What happens is people begin to live on blind faith that their Sky Daddy (who is actually most often Satan disguised) will deliver them, if not in this life, then the vague promise of a life after, which sounds more like indentured servitude to a strict disciplinarian of a father figure who insists on exactly how you should spend eternity in His presence. No thanks I’d rather rot and return my elemental resources to the earth. (The God I believe in is fatherly, yes, but benevolent and simply wants His children to have common sense.)

An interesting admission: “I knew that Christianity, with its instructions to man to “dominate and subdue” the earth, was part of the problem.” I respect that. So Kingsnorth turned to Buddhism and to Zazen, a practice of mindfulness that I’ve tried to integrate into my own life recently. But he says that it lacks love. I don’t buy that. What it lacked, and he openly admits this, he wanted to worship. Is worship a requirement for healthy spirituality? Or is it, ironically enough, a selfish desire?

Kingsnorth does admit that much of Christianity doesn’t really have anything to do with Christ anymore, and I absolutely agree with that. He chose to be baptized in the Romanian Orthodox Church, which he feels is still “true” Christianity. And here is the heart of the matter and where I must offer a strong critique:

“I grew up believing what all modern people are taught: that freedom meant lack of constraint. Orthodoxy taught me that this freedom was no freedom at all, but enslavement to the passions: a neat description of the first thirty years of my life. True freedom, it turns out, is to give up your will and follow God’s. To deny yourself. To let it come. I am terrible at this, but at least now I understand the path.”

I DO agree that freedom is NOT a lack of constraint. I do agree that “enslavement to the passions” is a major problem. Passions are dangerous if left to themselves. But the idea of “give up your will and follow God’s…” that is extremely reductionist thinking. Human will is what sets us apart from all our creatures. My personal “religion” if you can call it that, my take on what would be a “better” form of Christianity that I could vibe with, is one where the Bible is not Holy Scripture, but a key piece of literature that informs a vast majority of human literature overall. It isn’t “God’s word” but “divinely” inspired by traditional worldviews and underlining wisdom with God signing off on it. It is, after all, dispensed by humans, and every author in the Bible had their own agendas. 

I have a much more naturalistic worldview, that human beings were given this will, perhaps not by accident, by a greater force than we can imagine. Discovering God’s will comes through rationally and systemically coming to better understand ourselves, each other, and the world around us. I would argue that science is regular worship. Serving others, a primary tenet of the Baha’i faith, is the highest form of worship.

I have come to agree that faith is a useful thing, and I myself believe in a Divine Mind, but not one with a personage. The universe, itself, is one large conscious entity. Maybe this sounds silly, but I refuse to believe that “giving up your will” is the solution. Who is to say that the Bible accurately conveys God’s will? Appealing to authority is tempting. I think a lot of Christians, most in fact, are good people trying to live their best lives by being humble servants of God, a personal relationship with a reflection of the self they want to project to the world. 

On the other hand, Religion is a contentious subject. And while I think that Kingsnorth isn’t correct fundamentally on a lot of things that he says here, I do respect him for telling his story and I’m glad he’s found meaning through his spiritual journey. I have never truly believed in the “strait and narrow” path that was laid out for me by my “Christian” fundamentalist parents. They refused to recognize their trans daughter for who she was, and due to their faith, I am now dead to them. C’est la vie. I will never agree with any faith that leads to such limited worldviews that deny information presented right to their face.

So, I think it’s fair to say that Kingsnorth and I probably wouldn’t get along. Although he is my brother in Christ, and I think the dialogue would prove interesting. But he does present a lot of very astute observations, even if his conclusion is, in my opinion, “giving up” on the human exceptionalism which I continue to champion… not hyper-individualism, but the bettering of the individual to become a better servant of the whole. In a way, I’ve been practicing the Baha’i faith, believing that all these mystics and “holy men” all come along to teach us and remind us of things and that we should take them all into account when considering our own faith in a Higher Power.

Thank you, Gemini, for pointing out an impreciseness in my language. When I said “science is regular worship,” what I truly meant was “thinking scientifically is a form of regular worship we can do every day.” We must consider why we do what we do, why we think what we think, and not fall into the trap of dogma that Kingsnorth is so willing to do. However, I’m not so much interested in finding a writer who has a similar worldview as me as much as finding value in those I will disagree with strongly. I actually like that Gemini suggested Kingsnorth to read because as I said, I DO agree with a lot of what he says about the modern world, much as I do with Postman about how we treat Science itself as a religion, not as a form of worship for Creation and natural law. 

Both Postman and Kingsnorth get at fundamentally the same thing but Kingsnorth lays his arguments out more broadly where I can pick them apart while Postman hides behind academic credentialism and tenure and “whimsy” to express his displeasure with “liberal democracy.” That is to say, I respect Kingsnorth more for his straightforwardness whereas Postman gets halfway through Technocracy and starts contradicting himself by bashing “fundamentalists” when he’s literally saying fundamentalism (with a modicum of modern sense) is the way to go. (For lack of a better solution.)

I know plenty of authors that I agree with, but those I DISAGREE with are the ones against which I question everything I believe myself. Everyone has value, no matter how twisted their worldview might be. Except Nazis perhaps. And religious extremists who light themselves on fire and blow themselves and others up. I feel like people like Kingsnorth are being reactionist in their relentless pursuit of a “true Christian faith,” and overlooking the fact that they are dismissing the better aspects of secularism and even other religious faiths out-of-hand. The better avenue, I think, is to, and perhaps I’m hedging a bit too much here, to break one’s worldview down to “what happened to this person as a child?” and “How did society fail this person?” That will explain a lot.

…

I’ve seen childhood trauma be a major factor in people’s extreme views, on either end of the spectrum. I am not assuming someone is wrong because I don’t agree with them; I am very much hoping I will find something that I can get behind, even if I don’t agree with the structure of their argument. There is absolutely so much value in the Adversary. We need pushback, especially provocative and antagonistic feedback. 

…

I’m not a conservative or a liberal in the modern sense. Just this morning I said to Emily that I consider myself a “pragmatic moderate.” Like so many words in the English language, words are just play-doh these days to mean exactly what we want them to in the context we manufacture around them. As for how I want to map out this discussion, I want to sit with these conclusions today for a bit. I love how Gemini says I have a “politically homeless worldview” and I’m a bit proud of that.

…