April 1, 2026
I’m somewhat better today, not well enough to do much mental work as the head cold half of my illness is preventing focus. I’ve been sucking at ball games so it’s nothing but world of warships and Fortnite for me today. I did get some more article archiving done at least, but I didn’t even link them yet. That’s how little mental bandwidth I have at the moment. So the goal today is I’m just puttering about figuring out what’s what. I just had to wait for the dumpster to show up, and oh boy, we may fill it halfway just today! But I’m not actually doing any heavy lifting, just sort of coordinating so I don’t feel useless again.
April 2, 2026
My book progress stalled thanks to getting sick, but also, I can’t find much from 2023 worth saving. There’s not really enough for a book without poaching from cloud pieces…
In response to what Emily was writing over the past couple days:
There’s also an expectation of scale. We often don’t realize just how deep certain wounds run until we’re forced to face them. We often assign depth to things that don’t deserve them in order to make our world feel more tangible when everything feels out of control while simultaneously ignoring the depth of what’s right in front of us until you realize you’re drowning in something much bigger than yourself.
… I’ve been grappling with ideas so big that even my expansive vocabulary is struggling to define them. Perhaps that’s a humble brag, but all the words we could have rarely can give us the full picture. I keep thinking about how in reality we are just these absurdly complex electrical fields repelling off of countless other complex electrical fields, made up of these chains of tiny yet powerful little atomic particles and molecules. The absolute depth of our very existence is so vast. It’s mind boggling.
I’ve had far too much time to think and one concept that’s been relentlessly plagued by is the inevitability of time, how we seem to be trapped in these lanes of space time that we can’t escape, and to what end?
April 5, 2026
Emily had a great piece today: https://www.rescuegirl557.com/I-Wasnt-Lost-I-Was-Thinking-Differently-And-No-One-Noticed.php
I wrote down a couple lines from it in my Moleskine that I’ll copy here:
“There’s a fundamental difference between truth and usefulness, and most people conflate the two because it’s more comfortable.”
As I pointed out to Emily, people conflate information with truth and information with usefulness.
“Memory does not preserve events – it preserves the structure around them… Over time, the facts degrade, but the architecture remains intact.”
My hands are horribly stiff today, so I can’t easily type. I’m not doing any work today, just made these couple notes and fought with my chromebook to back up my weekly work (right now I have to still copy the whole damn kit and kaboodle which causes lots of failed copy operations.) That’s already enough for today.
I also need to get down these brief notes from Kyla’s newsletter, before I forget and they get buried.
Kyla Scanlon mentioned “financial nihilism, where people stop believing that the underlying economy is working for them and turn to gambling or some other seemingly quick fix instead to try and find stability.”
And this: “The optimization economy can’t deliver control, because the desperation is the market condition, and the pursuit of control through optimization is itself a loss of control.”
Ozempicization, looksmaxing… this world is out of control! There’s also been a shift to “belief capitalism” which “values narrative adhesion, the ability to keep enough people inside a story long enough that the story stays load-bearing.”
April 6, 2026
Something Emily wrote today: “Fairness is not an inherent property of the world—it’s a human construct, an attempt to impose balance on systems that are indifferent by default. Life does not distribute outcomes based on merit or intention. It distributes based on interaction, probability, and constraint.”
April 8, 2026
This episode about intimacy and performative stuff by Anna Howard today is incredibly good:
Gender is something we do. God, she’s amazing. She mostly talked about how being performative doesn’t mean fake or bad at all. Although it’s been turned into that in the current lexicon. Performativity can actually be a good thing.
Anna now has a vlog channel too. How delightful.
April 11, 2026
I did manage to get into hacking and slashing Chronicles of Absurdia. I did pull this bit that I want to expand on another time: “…I’ve always championed the power of words to heal, to connect, and to empower.
“A major goal of these “Chronicles of Absurdia,” in fact, is to keep open dialogues with the right souls. I need to force myself to take time to truly and openly express my thought process, and stop procrastinating on my writing work. Meanwhile, I want to produce something that’s useful and thought-provoking for those who stumble upon my work.”
I’m back to reading notes because I’m too braindead (and I also hurt my toe with a dropped fork of all things) to do anything else…
April 12, 2026
Guess I’ll see what I’ve missed on Sublime recently.
I don’t have my notebook handy so I’ll just put them here.
Interesting meme that reads: “Micro dosing hell by staying informed and educated.” This implies, according to the Insights, “that continual learning and information engagement is a daily antidote to overwhelm or stagnation.” Sounds about right. Another takeaway that Sublime suggests: “Information hygiene can be a coping mechanism for information overload.”
Great quote from an article that’s otherwise paywalled. I don’t know who said it, the author of the post Dan Frommer or the interviewee Scott Sternberg: “Someone needs to have the point of view and the audacity to communicate it, over and over, for a long time. That’s what other people will be attracted to. The magic is you.”
I did want to mention fern asmr’s weekly mantra. I haven’t mentioned one in awhile but this one is excellent: “I’m the owner and creator of my healthy environment. It got like two thirds of the vote by nearly 300 votes cast so l know this one is a winner.
April 13, 2026
I guess there’s a thing as too much sleep? I woke up at 630 after going to sleep at what must have been 9ish, but it took me half an hour to get up. It didn’t help that I had this dream where there were these two gorgeous New Zealand girls… it took place back when I was still in college. And one of these girls, an absolutely stunning blonde named Zephyr (I think that was her name) took to me immediately. We chatted and flirted for a bit, then she was gone and back to NZ. I woke up very distraught, and yet in my hand, here in my bed in Vermont, I was holding all the information from these two girls that somebody gave me before they left. Then I woke up AGAIN. And the info was gone. What a bizarre dream within a dream… so I was sad. Probably why I’m so sluggish and sad this morning. Good news… Sabrina [Carpenter] is much hotter and much more interesting. Lol.
RJ has this great prompt to figure out a plan for a 3 day protocol for burnout recovery. I need a 3 day protocol to find a friend and vet them before I decide they aren’t my friend or aren’t somehow masterminding a double life… [yes, this really happens!]
April 17, 2026
I’ve thought a lot about unfinished business. I’ve done so much starting, but very little finishing. I suppose you could say much of my art has been necessarily abandoned as my focus is rarely fixed for very long. If I were to pass away today, I don’t know what value my writings would even have. Thus I want to collect even the best unfinished bits. My abrupt endings could be someone else’s beginnings.
April 18, 2026
I decided to actually check out Arts and Letters Daily… reading high-entropy content? What a concept! And this article is scary: https://theamericanscholar.org/who-is-blake-whiting/
Guess what? Blake Whiting is AI-generated… fun times. I always dreamed of putting out a book per month. “He” put out 13 books in a week, making money off of actual archaeological and historical research… great stuff… I agree with Lawler that this is a very bad situation. I can’t believe Amazon didn’t find that suspicious… But what do they care if the books sell, right?
There is a LOT of paywalled stuff on this site. I respect that people need to make money. But it is simply not my way to pay a million subscriptions. I honestly would be OK with paying 0.99 an article for some of this stuff. Not a monthly thing… personally licensed articles, huh, what a concept.
Some great research on who actually gets awarded Guggenheim fellowships… https://www.publicbooks.org/who-gets-guggenheims/ – especially interesting to me is how the creative arts have been taking the lion’s share of fellowships over time at the cost of the natural sciences.
I really like this conclusion: “The historical trends show that the longstanding methods of selection, which often overlook the cumulative advantages provided by prestigious institutional affiliation, tend to coincidentally find talent in the same places, year after year. Ignoring this reality will result in replicating the status hierarchy of the past decades, all too often rewarding those already flush with resources at the risk of slowing or even halting innovative work from those less well-connected.” Coincidentally…
April 19, 2026
The only way I can salvage today is to go on sublime and try to pull anything useful. My nerves are too bad to hand write so I had to abandon that quickly earlier. I need to create some sort of short hand I guess. But at least after that mini brain shutdown I’m no longer typing the wrong words or leaving out words or adding words that don’t belong. Imma fucking wreck.
I immediately found something interesting and relevant:
“Maybe cognitive minimalism— identifying which mental loops actually matter, and pruning the rest— isn’t deprivation but liberation.” – parakeet, and the post was called “Skittle Factory Dementia Monkey Titty Monetization” yeah… trust me it makes more sense in context: https://parakeet.substack.com/p/skittle-factory-dementia-monkey-titty
Also this was definitely written with ChatGPT. Probably 40-60 percent of it. But still a good idea or two in here. It’s still very interesting. Even though I can only skip because my reading brain is at like 5 to 10 percent… low battery with no hope of charging up any time soon.
There’s also this quote from the same article:
“Your mind isn’t creating thoughts—your thoughts are creating your mind. Every time you revisit a particular thought loop, you’re voting for it to become your default operating system. Your thought patterns aren’t just habits— they’re prophecies, and what looks like a harmless habit today is actually destiny under construction.”
Definitely ChatGPT output but the idea is good.
Sighswoon on X said: “I think the key to posting online / being seen online is not feeling responsible for anyone who’s not caught up on your lore. You won’t be able to stop and explain yourself to everybody and catch them up on all that you’ve been cooking and pulling from over decades and you gotta let it go. The bigger you get, the more you’ll find total randoms demanding answers on things, seeing you as a 2D trading card , and you can’t feel responsible for that at all. It’s just flat and lazy on their part and has nothing to do with you. And you don’t want people around like that any way, crying out to you like you’re mama. Artists always know the depth and wonder of things and they will always outnumber the bad actors.”
That last sentence is very interesting. Thank you random people on X posting insights that platform doesn’t deserve.
April 20, 2026
Happy weed day. A nosebleed stole a couple hours from me last night, and some good chunk of my energy too.
I had to type this up; “You can’t just wait for answers to appear. You need to be constantly working on yourself. Asking better questions. Finding ways to make yourself free of expectations, especially those we unfairly pit on ourselves.”
I need to take my own advice!
… My sheer exhaustion let me get an hour of work in before I tanked and got suggested an amazing new channel called State of stats. The guy is hilarious and brings up a lot of good points about baseball stats.
The world has lost its mind. Not only is sports betting out of control but 2025 tops chrome football hobby boxes went from 350 to 400 to 900… to over a thousand dollars a box. The set is great, yes, but WTF?
Amazing rest is science episode today about reasoning and the deficit method of public communication and how it doesn’t work. (Just giving people the right “facts” doesn’t solve anything) And would a lottocracy (random people running things) actually work for government better than what we have? Amazing questions. Also we usually have conclusions before we even have reasons…
I’m amazed I got as much curating done today as I did. So much getting deleted… we all need our purge days.
April 21, 2026
My fatigue is so bad I’m taking a day off from life today. No work, no anything. Just the bare minimum. The energy, the drive… just not there today.
Right now the exhaustion and fatigue has left me in a holding pattern. But perhaps that’s where I need to be. Put the work aside and just rest.
…I’ve always felt that the solution is always right in front of you but it’s actually putting the language and the logical thinking together to make that conclusion clear to everyone else.
Lately I’ve been wondering what reality even is, if what we live in is actually the “real world” or it’s just our interpretation of it, how our brain processes the various inputs. Are we just all living in our own little quantum realities that somehow overlap with millions and billions of others? Is any of this real? Does any of it matter? Well, now, I think that as long as you are satisfying your own sense of self and purpose, then it matters to you and that’s all that is important.
…
This was the newest post on 3 quarks daily today: https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/04/compassion-and-responsibility-the-moral-architecture-of-the-mind.html
This is an absolutely brilliant article. I need to dive into these concepts. Especially the brain as a prediction engine. Along with some other mind blowing concepts that could each deserve a deep dive.
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/04/the-unknowable-and-inevitable-mourning.html
I love this idea of the intersection of philosophy, spirituality, and psychology and how sometimes they become indistinguishable from each other.
Great quote – existential psychotherapist Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning (1946): “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols (1889): “One must not respond immediately to a stimulus; one must acquire a command of the obstructing and isolating instincts. . . . All lack of intellectuality, all vulgarity, arises out of the inability to resist a stimulus: — one must respond or react, every impulse is indulged.”
Also the idea of micro learning. I saw an ad for it, basically breaking down topics into 15-20 minute daily sessions. I’ve kinda tried to do that before. Obviously you can’t do a deep dive but you can expose yourself to a lot of new stuff. As the ad boldly proclaimed, stop wasting your days and learn something. Well I’m still learning even in this very diminished state and I didn’t really work at all today. But I’m onto something with this approach of finding above average aggregators.
April 22, 2026
Today is Anna Howard day. And she’s looking stunning as usual… and today she’s making the claim, “your most obvious idea is your best idea.” Hmm.
Giving yourself the gift of a creative life… wow. Anna talks about how she decides what to make by falling in love with the questions. She’s unconcerned by how unoriginal the answer she comes to ends up being… She is major on point in this one! Reflecting on the answers you’ve lived your way into… who is this girl?
The art you make is most worth it to you when it serves as containers for the questions you’re asking yourself and working through at that moment, even if those works are the ones that don’t perform well through vanity metrics… they end up being worth making because of the value they give you through the process of making them.
Who is this genius woman? And I’ve written down so many quotes she’s put on screen! I want to grow up to be the Digital Gardener and curator that Anna is! But I refuse to touch TikTok, although the tumblr posts are surprisingly relevant… and dear lord when that girl glows up she is stunning! She makes me stop and think so much unlike any other podcast has ever done. And another big thing… I’m always trying to create a proof of concept for everything, I should just make shit and put it out there. No one looks at it anyway…
…
Ivy League schools are playing it much too safe, becoming institutional monoliths that are probably much more to blame for the flattening of modern communications than LLMs ever could be. After all, LLMs can’t be blamed for the input they are provided. It’s a concerning trend that it takes academics on the fringes and writers who clearly buck these low-entropy rhetorical trends to show up the heavy hitters in what we like to call “higher education.” Turns out, Ivy League schools are failing at actually teaching proper rhetoric or communication skills, if the brutally cookie-cutter output we still spat out by these institutions of “higher learning” is what is expected of the “best and brightest” recruited by these schools.
I believe the migration of “Higher Learning” away from physical campuses and into digital marginalia (as suggested by Gemini) has been underway ever since Covid. And seeing how these major institutions are pumping out this high-level compliance training nonsense at a blistering rate, someone has to highlight that the marginalia is where it’s at intellectually. While substack has given a few of these writers a much needed platform, it’s overrun by “performative intellectuals” and clever LLM powered content creation scripts. Sublime is a neat app that uses its own AI to curate “sublime” concepts from across the internet, but it’s only as good as its staff picks and whatever happens to relate well with whatever brain vomit users save to it. How can we find a way to “save” institutions from themselves? Or should we let the institutions rot in their growing beigeness and celebrate the amazing work being done on the fringes? I think the latter, honestly, is the solution.
What bothers me most is that this performative intellectualism is a direct result of institutional flattening of language and a lot of these content creators are a direct product of it. They are the one worth saving, those trying to break free of institutional rot but without the rhetorical tools to do so.
As an SEO specialist for over a decade it was part of my job to trick the algorithm with just the right density of popular keyword phrases, external and internal links, and lexical density to make the content I created rank highly. Of course, the tricks have to change over time and it’s a constant cat and mouse game figuring out how to get your content back on top of key search terms. Today, I’m all about Signal Boosting what I personally feel is good writing, however arbitrary my standards might be. While the gap between human created content and AI-generated content should be obvious, I believe people are already waking up and realizing how valuable good old fashioned human insight still is!
And we also should recognize that “performative” need not be a net-negative thing. It’s possible to be performative in a net positive way. The underlying rhetoric and philosophy are what must stand up to scrutiny.
April 23, 2026
Interesting meme on sublime that said “create like a child and edit like a scientist… That [mindset] has solved so many things.”
And a great Thoreau quote: “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
I have apparently saved this previously and because of my own fractured attention got buried in my hundreds of saves I never bothered to mention in journal form:
Basically there are only three options now.
1. Produce content and endlessly promote it until you drop dead.
2. Niche down to a point where you have just a consistent enough audience willing to give you a paid subscription to justify your time and energy put into creating extremely focused and specific content.
3. Wallow in obscurity (that’s me). Eventually things WILL change. That’s why I created the CRAP Framework and WAA. At least I’ll be sitting here curating things for when eventually someone cares… I’m going to put in the work, even if just to maintain my own sanity. And I even need a curator like Sublime to even get started…
This and the related sublime saves to it are really making me think… https://www.bitsofwonder.co/p/how-to-remember-everything-and-feel
I do think having a second brain is useful. Like paper journals and Obscure Curiosites. It’s only when we allow them to become mausoleums to past selves we no longer have any interest in honoring them that they lose their purpose. But I think simply deleting them isn’t the right move either… there has to be an in between solution. And I think I’m coming to it… curating what’s worth keeping, leaving behind a digital footprint that actually celebrates the person you were always in the process of becoming until you were done becoming anything but passed on… addition by subtraction is often necessary.
But like Anna [of Wild Geese] said yesterday, the best work is that through which you sit with the questions you’re currently asking yourself. Indeed, my favorite videos of hers are the ones that struggled for views, and she admits, the ones that did her the most good. Seeing your work as containers for those questions (which you let yourself fall in love with, as she said) is the solution … it’s not even the answers that matter so much; like I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, then asking better questions that give you more relevant answers that then beg new and more exciting questions. That’s what life should be… and it’s how we end up with amazing things… like batteries (her example, not mine.) Just keep asking questions, the one thing AI can’t do… because it has no questions of its own to ask. It can only help you build frameworks, which for me is useful, but such systems only go so far if you don’t have a narrative worth telling about the whole journey.
And right now, my narrative is extremely messy, and as yet, I’m not sure how my story will ultimately be told, and perhaps, it’s not even my job to tell my story… only ask my questions and let you share in my rabbit hole diving by publicly sharing my constant interrogation of this wild thing we call reality…I’ll let you come to your own conclusions as I know that my conclusions are already actually made… I just am still in search of better reasons for feeling and thinking as I do.
Emmelie had a great video about John Dewey’s “how we think”
I’d write down the quotes but I’m too fatigued after driving three hours…
April 24, 2026
I want to learn more about people’s favorite books… you know, the things people love, not hate… the passion stands for something, even if I ultimately don’t get it. The conversation the words have with us, the conversation we ultimately have with ourselves as we read the words and they filter through our consciousness. There is the true value of books, especially when we are intentionally active and constantly working through the many questions that end up arising. And if the only question is, why am I reading this? Or you’re thinking about something entirely besides the book it’s not the right book for you, right now, if ever. But maybe someday you’re willing to have that conversation… some of us are never ready.
Saved a couple things to pdf files both emails from sublime I want to return to later. Also skimmed through another where the most interesting thing was “bitching is voluntary brain damage”…
Watching a video about Gilbertsville NY. It’s just thirty minutes west of Oneonta. Adorable place. And what’s featured is this great shop called Badgerface beauty supply. They have patriarchy repellent! Why do I suddenly want to know more about upstate New York?
Cinzia is dealing with the EXACT problem I am. The physical manifestation of being overwhelmed and feeling worthless as a serious illness where you feel like your head is going to explode. This is what productivity culture does to autistic folks. She is WAY too critical of herself. So am I. Seneca was absolutely right about life… productivity culture apparently existed 2000 years ago too… the internet made her sick and me sick and millions of others too. Her idea of reclaiming her inner life by disconnecting from the internet sounds like a drastic experiment but it may really work for her. Unfortunately without the internet I would literally just lie there. Or get really stuck inside my own head. But she’s onto something really important. It really is just about making a much more intentional thing. I’ve been working on that.
Another great one… is a continuous narrative required for consciousness? Lots of questions to ask here.
Hey I found something new from Dana Gioia through arts and letters daily: https://porticoquarterly.com/book/the-last-of-the-lost-generation/
April 27, 2026
I was thinking about how I’m actually a very political person, but because I refuse to be partisan, I am somehow disqualified from “serious” political discourse. Because fuck me, that’s why.
Our society rewards binary thinking, a black and white checker board pattern of cognition. I think about chess boards where some pieces are completely stuck in white or black and all the other pieces alternate. Bizarre thought but interesting… I’m still letting this one cook for a bit. In my current rate of parsing these documents it will be at least a year or so before I return to it.
Fern asmr has a couple of particularly great mantras for this week. All three are good, but the one about taking time to really see your loved ones… I just have Emily, so that’s easy. I don’t need a mantra for that, but it is a good one. The one I chose was “how beautiful is simplicity? I embrace it every day.” And truthfully, I have been doing everything possible to uncomplicate every facet of my life. Including my own thought processes. By that I don’t mean outsourcing my thinking or reasoning to AI; I simply will not and have never done that. I mean always choosing the simplest option. The last one is also an excellent one that I could have easily chosen, and it got the same number of votes on Fern’s poll as the simplicity one: “inner peace > materialism. I focus on my inner happiness.” This is another thing I’ve been working towards. Good to see I’m on the right track.
As for finding inner peace. That’s difficult to do at the moment. But one thing I decided in the past couple days: I need to stop asking myself why people do such outrageous things, why they constantly self sabotage, or unleash torrents of irrational hate. It all begins within, once someone can’t live with themselves, they have to put those feelings somewhere… I simply no longer have any desire to answer questions not worth answering… People are gonna people and I simply must accept that nothing I do will make anything better for those who simply don’t know how to be helped.
…
I am becoming increasingly frustrated by paywalls “guarding premium content” with these “free trials” just to even read anything remotely interesting. A headline in particular that I discovered through arts and letters daily ended up being an article from the Atlantic on a topic of critical interest for me. It’s about the book Upward Bound by autistic author Woody Brown, and the debate is, did he really write it himself, and how much, if any, was crafted using LLMs? And this was one of the three articles curated today that were all paywalled beyond the first paragraph. A couple wouldn’t even let you read that without demanding you sign up for a free trial or commit to a subscription! So it got me thinking, all you need now is a premise to search with AI, and I can almost guarantee, you’ll produce as good if not an even better researched article with basic LLM tools available to everyone!
This whole walled garden strategy by these publications is not the way to have healthy online discourse at all. As an autistic individual myself, though, this is a topic I must explore… I watched a video from one of my favorite content creators Rowan Coleman on the merits of AI as a tool. And he agreed that while AI slop is out of control, the tools aren’t the issue. It’s not about anti-AI and pro-AI but rather anti-human and pro-human. I will continue to champion LLMs for increasing creative capacity and reducing tedium, as Rowan did. And perhaps it will allow autistic folks who struggle with communication (I’m not one of those but there are many who do) to tell their story when in the past it wouldn’t have been possible…
I do see artists celebrating the Process and Behind the Scenes more than ever. This is a good thing. Right now I am only focused on Process and while I haven’t written a proper essay in months, my output in terms of short reflections and notes has been quite prolific. I’m much less interested in performing art and much more intrigued by the process of iteration and dialogue with the ideas as they shift and squirm and blossom into something worthy of sharing on a blog that no one reads. The flowers still grow in the wild even if no one is there to smell them or even look at them.
…
I can definitely tell you that neurodivergent ideas have the same value as any neurotypical idea. They are usually just of a different shape and unusual cadence. They can be extremely inconvenient and uncomfortable. And that’s why neurodivergent voices are often stifled. Just because I happen to be able to speak more than adequately (I don’t shut up most days), and my writing is extremely well practiced and refined through endless hours of simply practicing the craft, doesn’t mean I’m any less neurodivergent to someone who either can’t speak or has motor delay, or simply doesn’t have the ability to articulate well in words that are relatable.
But you don’t have to be neurodivergent to have difficulty articulating. I think LLMs properly and intentionally used are a net positive for anyone trying to get their ideas out there. The idea of a “writing voice” is becoming more nebulous than ever. In the end, is the delivery or are the ideas presented the more valuable product? So, is the process actually the real work, and the product is just what we can sell to get something and move forward?
April 28, 2026
Today is for recovery. Things ended badly yesterday and I pulled up stakes with no intention of ever splitting myself between two places again. If I learned anything this weekend, it’s that fun and games time is over for me. It’s just the slow burn of getting all my words in order and making sure Emily is okay.
I spent all morning extracting Sagan reading notes and highlighting things worth coming back to. I may indeed start composting this stuff for more artistic “life and times” style content, but the mental load of four straight hours of journal composting was a bit much after all I’ve had to process the past few days. And there isn’t anything I want to watch so… guess Siri is gonna read to me for a while. Unless I have to keep dealing with paywalls. Everything on arts and letters daily today is all “premium” content. I want to throw up.
This is actually from the hedgehog review and ties in beautifully to all the Francis bacon quotes I was extracting from my reading notes of the demon haunted world: https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/the-man-who-invented-the-future
And what Siri reads to me is not the words on the page… only the middle section? What is going on here? FML, nothing is working right here…
I wonder if Gemini can write better articles than those that are behind paywalls… sad that I’m even asking myself this question.
This is interesting and not paywalled: https://www.alexnowrasteh.com/p/the-culture-crutch
We have a lotta culture… great stuff about how we need to challenge the incentives and prices, as well as institutions with poor incentives being at fault.
And now I get to chill with Hannah and Michael talk about morphogenesis! The applications of Turing’s equations have had a lot of very interesting long term consequences.
…
The evanescent nature of forgotten notions can be frustrating, but all you need is a particular word of the day to serve as a container in which to put the fragments of the unwritten into some sort of new context, allowing you to travel down a particular wavelength to either things you’ve long forgotten or didn’t even realize you were onto yet.
… What makes a word “juicy?” Objectively, better understanding words, even ones you’re already familiar with, should be a major boon for anyone whose primary occupation involves the written word. But, subjectively, we’re all going to have words we prefer over others simply because of how they sound or how they just happen to be just the right word at a particular moment. Essentially, how we feel about the words that exist only on the fringes of our vocabularies is an evanescent fancy; but if we take a moment to appreciate the word as having the history and potential utility that it does, it helps us to make such words a more permanent fixture in our correspondence, with both ourselves, our loved ones, complete strangers, etc.
April 29, 2026
I threw away the entire morning. And the dreams I had weren’t pleasant. Not really describable. Just stressful. Clearly my brain is overworked and that’s not surprising. And it’s a day where my nerves are shot too and aren’t improving. This entire day is going to be lost simply due to my entire lack of giving a fuck any more. That being said, I have to do something to not sleep away the afternoon, too.
I did manage to have quite a long chat with Gemini about essay as form by theodor adorno, forced myself to eat a peanut butter and jelly (with way too much of the latter) and for some reason started messing with journals again. Found a couple useful scraps that I highlighted but then I got to a point where I just gave up on the world again… seems that consistently every six months I just throw up my hands and disappear for awhile.
I got suggested a Wild Geese video from four months ago that I missed! How?
I feel like I have watched this… but I don’t care. It’s Anna <3
There is something I apparently missed before … The idea that you should read a nonfiction and fiction book at the same time that are thematically in conversation with each other… and Anna-tating (I’m pathetic, seriously) is useful by preceding the author’s talking directly to you, and you can’t suspend your disbelief the entire time.
…
I’d argue that it feels like I’m building a museum of durable ideas that will probably never get many visitors. And it’s a good thing I’m doing this in a liminal digital space because I couldn’t afford to keep the lights on otherwise. There is definitely a goal of preserving ideas, original or not. But the trick isn’t being original, but rather appreciating and sustaining the lineage of thoughts and ideas over centuries and even millennia. Intellectual honesty is the noble goal I strive for, and noble as it may be, for me it’s the only just and sound way to do my work. I want to give credit where it’s due because it makes me feel community in an otherwise often lonely and isolated space.
It makes me sick that people just plagiarize and wantonly steal and take credit when just making a simple citation doesn’t take away from the value of the act of curation plus anything they might have to build upon it. The problem is that so much curation happens without giving proper credit, taking popular essays and running them through an LLM to produce “original” text but just say the same exact things and elucidate the same points in just different words. It’s not exactly plagiarism but it’s just as lazy and even harder to detect. [Which honestly makes it sort of worse!] This is why I’ve shifted from writing essays to creating long form open journals where it’s more of a research log than a think piece or proper topical article.
I do think that others will follow my lead eventually, regardless if they realize what I’m doing or not. People are doing similar work to this but often the vast majority of that work is done privately or behind paywalls. My “noble” goal is to always provide my work for free to those who are willing to take the time to appreciate it for what it is. I’m done trying to be a communicator for a mass audience. It’s not productive for me and a waste of my energy to force myself to adapt to reductionist narratives and short form content containers when no one is heeding me anyway. And if my digital garden remains a space that only my wife and some poor random soul visits on occasion, then so be it.
If I’m not expecting guests to my humble digital museum of obscure curiosities, the questions could be sharpened to a point where they could literally pierce flesh. Any guest that does mosey on in here is putting their literal physical safety on the line. Obvious sarcasm and exaggeration aside, I do want to say that short form content can be valuable. But it is simply not for me. I tend to have thoughts far too elongated to fit in the popular mediums of mass social media.
About a year ago I gave up on ever reaching a mass audience and since then my questions have become a lot messier, cutting, and even downright uncomfortable. I like how you said the research log shows the oxidation, scaffolding, and dead ends. It’s an “ugly” form of writing, but it’s so much more honest than performative Substack or paywalled digital gardens that just copy and paste each other and redraft in their own personal favorite LLM. People just throw a question in perplexity and copy and paste the results with minimal commentary and call it intellectualism. And a lot of times, the “sources” are summaries of the first paragraph of paywalled content…
I’d rather just muck about in the few online spaces that are still open to the public and require someone with more than an 8th grade reading level to decode, works that still demand you not be afraid to look up every literary reference and require you to stop and really converse with the authors musings. Such high grade material is still out there. You just have to know where to look, and my notes will point to those places. Now it’s a matter of me organizing the notes in such a way that I can find them at a moment’s notice later.
April 30, 2026
Being the last day of the month, I’m reflecting on how far I’ve come in six months. I haven’t read nearly as much as I probably should, but what I’ve managed to read has been very enlightening, especially ‘The Picture of Dorian Grey’ and ‘The Tale of Two Cities,’ both fantastic classics, even if they both drag a bit in spots. (They were written for serialized publications back in the day, mind you. So that’s why I can forgive their sometimes wobbly structure.)
… I have a lot of ideas about how my writing must shift going forward. I truly need to ‘snuggle up’ to my ideas and stop worrying so much about biography and context (as I’m so wont to do) and go hard into deep dives with no regard for if anyone but myself is going to care. That is to say, I’m going to write purely for myself and my own amusement, because at least it will feel like something worth doing.
