December 2, 2025
I logged onto my Sublime app today, and in the Staff Picks was this: Warren Buffett said goodbye in his annual letter. This is what he had to say,
“One perhaps self-serving observation. I’m happy to say I feel better about the second half of my life than the first. My advice: Don’t beat yourself up over past mistakes – learn at least a little from them and move on. It is never too late to improve. Get the right heroes and copy them. You can start with Tom Murphy; he was the best.
Remember Alfred Nobel, later of Nobel Prize fame, who – reportedly – read his own obituary that was mistakenly printed when his brother died and a newspaper got mixed up. He was horrified at what he read and realized he should change his behavior.
Don’t count on a newsroom mix-up: Decide what you would like your obituary to say and live the life to deserve it.
Greatness does not come about through accumulating great amounts of money, great amounts of publicity or great power in government. When you help someone in any of thousands of ways, you help the world. Kindness is costless but also priceless. Whether you are religious or not, it’s hard to beat The Golden Rule as a guide to behavior.
I write this as one who has been thoughtless countless times and made many mistakes but also became very lucky in learning from some wonderful friends how to behave better (still a long way from perfect, however). Keep in mind that the cleaning lady is as much a human being as the Chairman.”
That’s some beautiful stuff. Thanks to SMB Attorney on X for sharing this.
I think we all knew the day Warren Buffett would retire was coming. He is 95 years old after all!
…
From John Evans in his Substack essay (Of Agents and Agency – by Jon Evans – Gradient Ascendant):
“LLMs are tools that often masquerade as solutions, an unfortunate state of affairs which has led to remarkable amounts of confusion, frustration, rage, and opprobrium. Almost all of the criticisms aimed at their outputs (as opposed to their training) stem from this deceptive category error.”
Opprobrium is a great word, meaning “harsh criticism or censure.” And Mr. Evans is absolutely correct that critics are blaming the outputs not the inputs. A computer is only as good as the information it’s fed, after all. And these models are trained in such a way to be just ‘good enough’ to make people feel like they are a smart friend who can do their homework for them.
…
I got these emails from Stacked Marketer that I thought I unsubscribed from, but I’m glad I got this one today. It was about how AI-driven sales have boomed.
Just read this email introduction in its entirety. You’ll understand why it makes me sick:
“The cyber weekend is behind us. Here’s what went down.
The robots are learning to sell: AI-driven traffic to retail sites leaped 805% year-over-year on Black Friday, hitting a record $44.2B.
Shoppers who clicked through from AI services were 38% more likely to make a purchase.
You’re probably already thinking about how AI surfaces your products. But if you aren’t, you’re skipping major conversion rate opportunities.
It’s not just AI helping shoppers over the line: Buy now, pay later (BNPL) hit $747.5M on Black Friday alone, up 8.9% from last year.
Inflation-squeezed consumers are leaning hard into flexible payment options, especially for electronics, apparel, and furniture…
The invisible quarter that isn’t: TikTok’s Q5 shows 81% of users spending equal or more time on the platform while CPMs drop across the board.
Lower costs, sustained engagement, and goal-oriented users make this the efficiency play of the year. One in three TikTok users say searching on the platform is key to achieving their New Year’s goals.
But it does make you wonder if this is just a PR play to keep ad spend from slipping?”
I don’t blame the people who write the newsletter. In fact, I have to thank them. To think that AI-driven traffic rose 8x year-over-year is disturbing. AI “surfacing” products is a phrase I never thought I’d read in my lifetime. It makes me want to throw up. The whole Buy Now Pay Later thing is an old-as-time concept, I’m not so concerned about that.
What’s even more concerning is that TikTok has a Q5. I don’t have to explain why that bothers me. A 5th quarter? And ‘efficiency’ plays? We’re not running an offensive scheme for the Kansas City Chiefs here! ‘Users’ have become entirely dehumanized in the marketing world. It’s gross and infuriating to me! In fact, I only learned about this term recently, meaning the time between December 26-January 1. I never knew that this was “hidden” or “invisible.” Pretty soon we’re gonna have Q6 and Q7 and Q8 going onto infinity! (Hilariously there IS an Infiniti Q5! The car company was ahead of the game, apparently.)
And this is a discussion popping up all over the internet and YouTube. It’s getting depressing.
For me, that “Q5” time has always been one of reflection and wrapping up the calendar year emotionally and mentally. I don’t do “new years resolutions” and neither does Emily, at least not specifically. But we do each review our goals going forward and I specifically ‘rededicate’ myself to writing. My discussions with Gemini, if you can realistically call them that, recently have pushed me into going forward with this more dialogue-focused style of writing. I’m actually better suited for it than the more serious “essays” I wrote in the past. Ironically enough, it’s still essay writing, but detached from any expectations of platform or audience or benchmark.
And one thing I have really thought about is the whole idea of being intentionally inefficient in an ‘efficiency-obsessed world.’ I was saying to Emily just now that despite this obsession with efficiency, most of the products and services we are sold are, by design, inefficient. It’s a very frustrating paradox to me. So many things are built with planned obsolescence in mind, so many products and services are designed with a very particular lifecycle in mind. And those lifecycles are quickly shrinking. With how AI agents are taking over many of the clerical tasks that I performed in my own career, I see the unemployment rate skyrocketing and people needing to turn to ‘content’ or ‘AI babysitting’ to try and stay solvent. AI really will be interacting with AI more than ever I think in just a couple of years.
The only people that will survive are those who stay ahead of the game and on top of their tools. Plus tradespeople, of course. The world is going to be drowning in AI-on-AI interaction while us humans get lazier and more complacent with mediocrity. I don’t mean to be bleak, but the future looks very depressing. So, I’m thinking that I need to make myself content with being messy and inefficient and all over the place, just follow my curiosity and greatly reduce the content inputs that I’ve become so accustomed to.
Human beings were never designed to be content consumers at the rate we are today; and even someone like me who is pretty intentional about what I choose to watch, I’m still consuming more than my brain can handle, apparently. Even I have fallen victim to a society obsessed with nostalgia, and I need to back off ASAP.
…
As the LLM models have proceeded to improve over the past couple years, I started feeling like my own writing was inadequate. But that’s only because like so many folks, I was overpowered by the shiny object, the glossy flowing prose, empty as it inevitably proves to be, made my messy human diction feel inferior. I realized I must surpass the models. I must stay ahead of them however possible. For me, ChatGPT has raised the floor that I must clear in order to keep my humanity from being buried under varnish and thick woven tapestries of cosmic proportions.
… Cloud Pieces in particular is a collection full of vulnerabilities. I’m not even really all that excited about writing essays anymore. I’m burned out on them. I want to focus on free-flowing dialogue, not heavyweight ideas flattened and deconstructed to their most basic elements for the benefit of lay audiences. During a dark time and creative nadir for me, I did try to let LLMs morph my jagged ideas into some sort of tangible form… but this was all a massive mistake. Still, some great things did inevitably rise from those unhealthy sessions of giving up my agency just to feel something.
December 9, 2025
Anna of Wild Geese has a great video about personal curriculum.
This is something I thought about doing but like Anna, if I give myself too strict of a plan, I’ll rebel against it. I love this “research as ceremony” as a way to reframe learning, getting away from “colonialist” and individualistic learning. Also it’s a good point she made that the long form stuff used to be free and we had to pay for the lightweight stuff, but now it’s the other way around. The long form stuff is a lot harder now to access!
So, by not stretching and exercising our minds enough, we’re doing the same thing as not getting enough physical exercise (something my condition already doesn’t let me do.)I really like the “lighthouse learning” concept too, and interest spirals are all I ever have. It’s similar to Montessori, but goes to another level. We need to “decolonize” learning. <3
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Reviewing my notes on Maria’s video about the Johann Hari book, Stolen Focus…
Working over my notes with Gemini, it was pointing out some of the reductionist language Hari used that I glossed over. I think that his initial concepts are sound, but he doesn’t go as deep as he could or should.He’s creating these very strict dichotomies. There are absolutely useless or even malicious books out there, and I’ve started reading a few only to quickly discard them.
As for the internet, I don’t engage in social media much at all outside of seeing a few quotes here and there that have been curated by the few online writers I still follow. But when I was on social media, the fury did become overwhelming, which is why I inevitably quit all those services cold turkey. I hung around Instagram the longest, but I got no value there and when AI slop started invading my feed… [I finally returned to Instagram basically because it was the only service I was comfortable returning to for promoting the podcast. It’s gotten a BIT better than when I left, but getting traction is nigh impossible.]
Hari is onto some very strong distinctions between reading books vs screens, but he’s not making the distinction between what’s good content vs bad content. After all, you can read classics on screens. While, yes, the experience is different, you’re still getting a similar one, especially if you take time to handwrite quotes, in a sense “freeing” them from their digital prison. Hari is definitely romanticizing books a bit too far, and perhaps the “books as savior” trope is cliche, but his points aren’t so much incorrect as they are undersupported and reductive…
Perhaps the most misunderstood thing about reading that I’ve noticed is that every book will approach someone differently. But because books are static, a book that we may have dismissed in our younger years could be one that we devour in later years. It’s funny when you read a book after a couple decades and while you know it hasn’t changed, your interpretation of it has vastly altered.
I was rereading Charlotte’s Web recently, my childhood favorite, for the first time in I can’t say how long, and it’s funny how much my memory of that book was tainted by the 1970’s cartoon adaptation, because the actual book is a lot more clever and is more a story about the gullibility of what people read in print than the actual plot itself. What is a memorable story about Wilbur and Charlotte is just a vehicle for White’s own frustration with the press and how foolish adults really can be in just accepting the status quo, while kids not having this ‘life experience’ are often unafraid to call it out when something seems unjust (which in the case of Wilbur, Fern turns out to be absolutely correct.)
The one part that really bothers me about what Hari said is that nonfiction isn’t capable of building empathy, and that’s just nonsense. It seems Hari has read the wrong nonfiction, and any “studies” that back up this claim are clearly flawed in their execution.
… I think that Maria is captivated by the Aesthetics, and at least partly the Rhetoric. But when it comes to the Philosophy side of what Hari is saying, she’s not being nearly Critical enough. Maria herself prefers fiction, so her bias is on full display. And so many books like Hari’s lean on studies that may or may not be properly executed.
Also, I’m not sure if I want to purchase the book now, looking into Hari’s past: “Until 2011, Hari wrote for The Independent, among other outlets, before resigning after admitting to plagiarism and fabrications dating back to 2001 and making malicious edits to the Wikipedia pages of journalists who had criticised his conduct.”
Um, I don’t think Maria knew this. I definitely need to look more into these authors before I run out to buy their books. Holy crap. Talk about a copy-paste mentality! Did he even write Stolen Focus? That’s not a shadow I can see anyone ever escape from!
Meanwhile, EB White is one of the most successful and lauded essayists (deservedly so) that tried his hand at children’s fiction and absolutely succeeded there, too. In Hari’s case, yeah, people make mistakes under pressure, but then he would maliciously edit Wikipedia pages of people who criticized him? That’s a bridge too far.
I’m not sure I want to give Hari, a known plagiarist and liar, any more of my time, even if the ideas are intriguing. His credibility is practically nonexistent… it’s a shock that his book did as well as it did!
…
On how I read Charlotte’s Web now… White did actually say something in an essay about how he started writing children’s books because he’d basically given up on trying to get through to adults. Turns out, through Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, and Trumpet of the Swan, he succeeded because a lot of my own writing is directly inspired by his children’s stories and his essays.
As for the “duplicate work” idea, it is a topic I wanted to expand into something further, but ironically, I stumbled on the perfect example of someone in Hari who literally did duplicate work, but in the worst way possible. He used other people’s work as a short cut, made crap up when he felt he had to, and once he got called out for it tried to ruin others. It’s absolutely baffling to me that Maria would take his book seriously at all!
Apparently, we have come to the point where the work is seemingly entirely separate from the one who wrote it, and honestly, I don’t think that’s possible. It’s sheer laziness and intellectual dishonesty to let the AI do all the work for you [or even a significant fraction of it], even if factually it ends up being correct. If Hari used too much AI, I can almost forgive that; but it’s how Hari responded to criticisms of his past work, the obvious flaws in his character, that make me unwilling to entertain his “work” any further.
So we must identify the correct way to interact with the ideas of others. I see some phrase or sentence or even paragraph I like and physically jot it down. Then I type it up, then allow the seed planted by whatever text fancied me to develop into a bloom that others can then benefit from. Hari doesn’t seem to care at all about the iteration process… see idea, transplant idea, and have AI rewrite it just enough that it’s “original.” Truth is, no idea is “original,” because all ideas that could ever exist already are out there.
Like Henry Ford once famously said, “The air is full of ideas; they are knocking you in the head all the time.” While he wasn’t a particularly “nice” guy, Ford was absolutely correct about that.
So, I think the core of what I really want to say, leading from me getting back to handwriting notes to do the cognitive work that so many people are skipping out on, is that AI has made it too easy to become cognitively lazy and deficient. And while copy and pasting the output from generative AI isn’t precisely plagiarism, in some ways it’s worse because it’s “original” but the “author” did none of the work, and that is the issue.
… notably, Maria of Strange Lucidity handwrites all of her notes! That’s why I’m dumbfounded that she never bothered to research the author of Stolen Focus! Who knows how much of that book was Stolen Words, and by 2022, there were tools to rewrite other works as “original” so for all we know that whole book is a fraud! While written eloquently, the ideas she mentions turn out to be reductive and quantized into flattened prose! This is a key point, that I’m watching even respected literary critics somehow have these blinders on to who the author is. It’s almost like the author doesn’t matter anymore; an author is just someone who pushes buttons. For that to affect even a literary traditionalist like Maria is scary as hell to me! [It was a very rare moment of weakness for my Austrian Queen of Comparative Literature, for sure.]
… The key issue here is that authors as people who take ideas, remix and refine them organically and create something more durable and useful, aren’t valued nearly as much in that way anymore. Nowadays, a successful “author” identifies ideas that are sticky and trendy, then hires a team of copywriters (or, gasp, uses LLMs) to create something that appeals to a general audience. After that, this manuscript is then reviewed by other copywriters/LLMs and finally after being checked for “plagiarism” and perhaps adding a few “expert sources” to make it more credible, we get a finished product. It’s an assembly line of “knowledge work” but it’s not really authorship.
Writing should NOT be a commercial product, but rather an inevitable outcome of a mind working through countless sleepless nights fixated on certain ideas and making them work in harmony with each other. We should be reading at least in part the inner monologue of someone who is dedicated to their subject and shares that passion with the reader through the very cadence of the text. Hari’s book, from the few quotes I shared, sounds a bit too polished, and while not stinking of GPT-isms or anything like that, was likely polished up by expert editors who were paid to try and “redeem” Hari’s reputation. It makes me sick.
… So I’ve discovered a very serious flaw in reading culture; the fact that serious bookish types and booksellers are willing to carry a book from someone like Hari scares me. It seriously threatens the legitimacy of authorship more generally. If someone like Hari can publish a book after being exposed, how many authors are editing Wikipedia pages and “stealing like an artist” on a regular basis and simply never get caught? This is why I’ve been so reluctant to publish anything. Why should I put the effort into putting together a volume of my best work when it will be ignored in favor of eloquent but ultimately reductive works like Stolen Focus?
…
First I gotta mention Jeff Kent getting into the Hall of Fame. The contemporary era’s committee had a bizarre ballot this year. I’m kinda shocked he got in and not Delgado (who it seems was a vote short). Kent was always a borderline guy to me. I think if you vote him in, you also vote Delgado. But at least now Bonds, Clemens, and also Gary Sheffield have to wait until 2031 to try again. So at least we’ll get some new names next time. But I really am having a hard time putting HOF next to Jeff Kent’s name. I of course have no choice. I’m not angry but now anytime I see his cards I have to go, shit, he belongs in my hall of fame box!
In fairness, Cooperstown Cred offers that maybe Kent’s glove wasn’t quite as bad as people thought. I remember reading his article back in 2017 and disagreed that Kent was deserving of the Hall. Well, screw me, because he’s now as much of a Hall of Famer as Ken Griffey Jr. And now rereading this article, realizing that his OPS+ was actually better than Roberto Alomar, Ryne Sandberg, or Craig Biggio… yeah, he played in a lot of pitcher friendly ballparks. OK now I can see it as defensible… but still, you have Bobby Grich and Lou Whitaker (and heck even Willie Randolph) with better WAR. Yeah, WAR isn’t everything. But at least I’m not as WTF… and by total zone, Alomar was actually not that much better than Kent? Huh… how did I not remember this? I did know that Biggio was overrated defensively (he was actually fairly below average) but wow. OK.
So, the Red Sox have been busy. I knew about the Richard Fitts for Sonny Gray trade, which made sense to me. Recently they also traded top prospect outfielder Jhostnyxon Garcia for pitcher Johan Oviedo, plus some other guys involved. Again, I can’t fault this trade. The Sox desperately need pitching depth and while I’m sure they like Jhos the Sox have a million outfielders for three spots. It makes sense. The lefty Samaniego could also factor into the Sox bullpen plans. Finally the Sox are making moves that make sense. I wouldn’t mind getting Pete Alonso in Boston, although the Orioles are in on him too. I was a little sad to see them let Stephen Matz go to the Rays; he was superb out of the pen.
The Jays are taking a three-year $30 million chance on Cody Ponce, who got extremely good in the KBO and even won an MVP (yes that’s rare for pitchers over there too!) Curious to see what pieces end up moving there as their payroll is pretty high right now. Berrios is rumored to be the odd man out of the rotation with Yeasavage coming out of nowhere last year.
You know what’s funny. Cooperstown Cred is why I build my websites like I do. I actually asked him once on Twitter why he doesn’t compile all his great articles into a book. I’m not the first one to have asked this. His response was basically that he prefers to have a living archive, for cases (like Kent) where somebody finally gets in the Hall and all the people who disagreed with him (I disagreed with his support of Kent for the Hall back in 2017 but respected his argument) can finally suck it. No he didn’t say suck it but his point that having a living archive that he could later update while preserving his initial arguments (which he only rarely revises as most of these guys end up hall of famers anyway) was part of the fun to him. It’s purely fun, and obviously he’s still at it right now in December 2025.
Yes, Cooperstown Cred is why I prefer to keep an archive, and honestly, it probably is the best way to go in the long-run. And yet these past few years I kept deleting everything and starting over. That’s why TPD is the “collection” stuff whereas Obscure Curiosities is the odds-and-ends that just don’t fit. The notes, the appendices, the et ceteras. But it’s funny that I now realize where my living archive idea came from!
I’m reading the more recently updated articles. I completely missed the fact Davey Johnson isn’t in the Hall as a manager and he’s now passed away. Also he was traded by the orioles to the braves because of the emergence of Bobby Grich. And davey hit 43 HR the next year, a fluky season. But it’s still the number one HR total for a second baseman in a single season! (It’s actually 42 as one was as a pinch hitter). Fulton county stadium was a nutty park for homers, and probably aided dale murphy quite a bit too! You could even say Hank Aaron benefitted, but I don’t think anyone will argue that. Davey was there for when hammering Hank beat Babe’s career record. I knew that Davey was a numbers guy as a manager but I didn’t realize he got a math degree after his playing days and before he managed. How about that? Geez he was quite the renaissance man!
Also, Bill James made a system to rank managers for the hall of fame and I think he made it just to prove a point about Davey Johnson. Is bill james ever actually wrong? I can’t remember a time where he was! (Outside of guys who got hurt or had other non baseball issues which we can forgive).
As for Fernando Valenzuela I’d put him in the hall, but not just as a player. Also as a broadcaster. Spanish is a language folks! It’s also the language of most of today’s mlb players. Fernando mania had that much effect on the high Latino percentage of players today! Never discount that.
December 10, 2025
I have this great quote from a 1977 Joan Didion essay called on the road. She was on a book tour and had some very interesting thoughts on how everybody was incredibly obsessed with opinions, especially about “where are we going?”
“I lost track of information. I was blitzed by opinion. I began to see opinions arcing in the air, intersecting flight patterns. The eastern shuttle was cleared for landing and so was lapidary bleakness. John Leonard and joy were converging vectors. I began to see the country itself as a projection on air, a kind of hologram, an invisible grid of image and opinion and electronic impulse.”
I’m not sure what lapidary means and the John Leonard and joy reference wasn’t one I got. But otherwise, I think this quote is applicable to today’s world too. If anything, opinion seems to replace facts for some people.
One of the few times using AI is okay, when you’re just stuck on what some reference might be. Gemini’s response.
1. Lapidary Bleakness
“Lapidary” originally relates to the cutting, polishing, or engraving of stones and gems. When applied to writing or style, it means concise, elegant, and precise—often with a degree of hardness or coldness.
When Didion pairs it with “bleakness,” she is describing a worldview that is depressive or grim, yet articulated with crystalline perfection. It suggests that the bleakness isn’t messy; it is polished, hard, and unyielding. Ironically, this is often how critics describe Didion’s own style.
2. John Leonard and Joy
John Leonard was a prominent literary critic for The New York Times.3 In 1977, he wrote a famously glowing review of Didion’s A Book of Common Prayer, essentially cementing her status.
The absurdity she is highlighting here is the “leveling” effect of the media grid. In the “hologram” of opinion, a specific human being (John Leonard) and an abstract human emotion (joy) become equivalent “vectors.” They are just data points arcing through the air.
Those explanations elucidated things quite well.
…
When I’m reading an author who has both nonfiction and fiction, I tend towards reading the essays before novels. It’s like how I read hundreds of E.B. White essays (yeah, I have basically everyone he ever wrote in print) before I reread his three children’s books. But literary people keep saying that novels raise your ceiling, while nonfiction only raises your floor. However, in my mind, you should raise your floor as much as possible because that can only raise your ceiling higher – the ‘sea raises all ships’ sort of thinking.
Anyhow, other than my reading notes of Didion, I’ve been pretty intellectually flat lately. I think it’s because the texture of reality has gotten even more shocking and toxic since Didion’s time. I just want to stick my head in video games and wait out the storm, which may never pass.
… Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel is not a game; it’s literally taking your time on this earth and flushing it down the drain.
I don’t even play that competitively because that’s a brutal min-maxing affair that is part of the toxic competitiveness that I got away from in “paper” Magic the Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh years ago. Master Duel used to be a fun casual environment. You had some competitive try-hards yes, but now, it’s where people just bash each other in the face because they have no life outside of that game…
I wanted to focus on building decks with a whole bunch of random cards because that’s fun. But what fun is it when you get to click a red surrender button twenty times straight (actually I think the most losses in a row I’ve ever had was 11 before someone inevitably throws me a bone and disconnects because of bad wi-fi or scoops with a bad hand…) I also have a limit of games I play. If I play 10 games and win only one, that means I need to find a different thing to do, even if that’s literally taking a nap…
…
I’ve noticed that with a lot of online discourse, especially in “communities,” you have a few “influencers” that pretty much run the show. Yes, people may offer good ideas and improve the community as a whole, but someone like me who often comes out of left field and talks about something no one else thought of before, I get shunned 99 percent of the time. Even if a couple people speak up and say I have a point, the majority just either ignores me or says extremely mean things that make me curl up in a fetal position. You know, because bullying is apparently really cool these days! The saddest part is that these online bullies are actually pathetic… but with the way the vast majority of popular online “community building” platforms offer such a terrible choice: pay up and join them or walk away and be a Vermont hermit who only talks to herself, her wife, and a chatbot…
I think it is absolutely insane that speed runners will go down to the single frame with a world record. Like with Mike Tyson’s punch out, summoning salt was trying to get a 1:59, but it took him literal years. It’s so ridiculous. But it’s entertaining.
December 11, 2025
Today I’m going back to looking at the Sublime app, and there were a couple things I wanted to talk about.
One was about “feed bankruptcy.” Yeah, I used to love feeds, too, but there is just so much content to consume now that you’re never really able to “keep up” with all the sites you end up subscribed to. It’s why I left Substack; I couldn’t be subscribed to more than a handful of people. Interestingly enough, I subscribed to some people and never saw their emails come in, so I’m not sure what’s up with that, while others I get two emails somehow… and I can’t seem to fix that. I’m even considering unsubscribing from the couple I have left, plus the ones I keep seemingly keep getting added back to… like Stacked Marketer seems to keep adding me back and they are so late-capitalist-coded I can’t bear to read them anymore.
There’s also this, actually two things from the same article:
“Culture isn’t stagnating; it’s evolving in ways that we’re struggling to recognize and appreciate. The challenge lies not in reviving what’s dead, but in developing the language to understand what already exists.”
AND
“In just under one generation, we moved from appreciating albums as cohesive works to consuming individual tracks, and then to music becoming reduced to muzak: background noise for gaming, viral videos, or endless scrolling. Disappearing is music as an art in its own right, which commands sustained attention and deep engagement. A song’s success is measured not by critical acclaim but by whether their song goes viral or becomes the “soundtrack” to someone’s life.”
Katherine “Default Friend” Dee, “No, Culture is not stuck”
https://wisdomofcrowds.live/p/no-culture-is-not-stuck
Before I say any more, I’m going to actually read the article. I know, what a concept… She’s absolutely correct that it’s no longer just “old man yells at cloud” – I prefer the term “old lady shaking a stick at those kids today” because that’s what I feel like most days…
This part stuck out to me too: “…maybe we’ve simply grown accustomed to digital photography’s age-concealing effects —a contrast to film photos that more readily showed signs of aging. (Interestingly, makeup trends have evolved more distinctly, perhaps because they adapt better to the nature of social media.)”
It actually drives me nuts how complicated and over the top makeup routines are now. Like the lengths Sabrina Carpenter has gone too over the past couple album cycles… it’s why I have pictures of her with minimal makeup that I keep around to remind myself, you know there’s a naturally gorgeous woman under all that product… people have turned themselves into products (yes, even men, too!) I look at these more natural photos of Sabrina to remind me there is still actually beauty in the world, but people forgot what it looks like!
So now that point she made about music vs “muzak.” This isn’t a new thing. It’s just that we’ve been fortunate to have artists that are able to break the mold and keep the industry from entirely stagnating. I look at music today and, yeah, there’s plenty of music being made, but most of it is just echoes of past successes. Even the new Bon Iver album didn’t really catch much attention; and there are good tracks on it. It seems like Sabrina has the chance to absolutely dominate the Grammys this winter; I mean she has six goddamn nominations! She absolutely deserves them, but shit, she just doesn’t have competition! [And she didn’t win ANY of them…]
Right now, Music is just… blah. Man’s Best Friend isn’t even as good as Emails or Short N Sweet, but it’s still better than anything else I’ve heard… including Life of a Showgirl, which quite ironically includes SABRINA on the title track and is the highlight of the whole damn album. Fortunately for Tay, LOAS is ticketed for the 2027 Grammys, so with its massive commercial success, she should be on her way to extending her Grammy record… unless Sabrina drops yet another album, or the Alice in Wonderland film dominates the charts like recent musical films have (which I haven’t enjoyed, but this one I will because, well, it’s SABRINA!) But I digress. Taylor is still the Industry, but we’re all living in Sabrina’s world right now and I love it! (And I’m sure Tay is fine with that too!) [I never saw OR3 or Ella’s Dandelion coming though, so there’s EXTREMELY tough competition for Showgirl, which I’m not convinced is better than either of those records.]
But yeah, TikTok is what drives music now. Does it go viral? Well, TikTok is the reason Espresso blew up. And I hate that. Sabrina shouldn’t have needed TikTok to become a megastar, but this is how it happened. It makes me extremely sad. (Emails did pretty well on TikTok too, btw.) The difference with Sabrina, and she brings this up herself a lot, she just makes music that she enjoys and doesn’t focus on making hits. That’s why while Man’s Best Friend really only had Manchild as its big hit, it’s clear that it’s something she loved making. Same with emails and short N Sweet, although Short N Sweet was definitely pushed towards hit-making (it was massively overproduced). Still, Sabrina is just THAT good and THAT DEDICATED to the art form of music that it’s transcending everything else at the moment, ironically even TAYLOR of all people!
I absolutely agree that culture still exists. Just somehow it’s no longer mainstream. And like I’ve been doing with Gemini, what we need is new language to describe what’s actually happening, how while big studios keep beating dead horses, innovations are happening constantly under our noses. Eventually, these novelties break though, like Chappell Roan and, of course, Sabrina <3 The sad thing is it took both of them a decade for people to recognize their talent for what it is.
“The Internet-Personality-as-Art is ephemeral, challenging, and doesn’t even register as a performance to most critics.”
I figured that out years ago. I just never figured out how to capitalize on it…
Also I just learned Fifty Shades of Grey was originally Twilight fanfiction. But the names were changed after the erotic content had the original version taken down. You gotta be shitting me. How did I not know this? Well, this came out in the Colorado years so I guess I have to forgive myself for that…
Kyla Scanlon has a long newsletter and fortunately she reads them out on substack. It’s very interesting and a lot I’dlike to write about when my eyes recover. Also her book I did order already and should be at the post office when we check tomorrow… she brought up what I said to Emily recently: China is now getting nvidia chips and they have a way better energy grid than the US does. China could beat the US in AI very quickly and they will control the future. Fun times. For her to say it too really scares me. She calls out the casino economy and the financialization of literally everything. Commodity fetishism is rampant. Oh boy.
I agree with every single one of her conclusions because I came to all of them myself a couple years ago. And things are playing out as I predicted. But the best part is the little Jimi Hendrix anecdote she mentioned at the end; that he always made his music for people with transition radios, not the new fancy FM that was just starting. His thinking: meet the people where they’re at. And that’s just not happening anymore, just a bunch of overwhelming “bad vibes” and TMI stressing us all into oblivion.
December 16, 2025
On the idea of “doom spending”: I’ve noticed that hobbies I used to enjoy, spectating sports, trading card games, video games, and just about anything else seen as a leisure activity have been destroyed by unreasonable men. Sports are now synonymous with gambling over every possible outcome on any given play. Trading card games are now all about min-maxing decks and chase cards and overprinting to meet outsized demand (cards have themselves become a meme stock). Video games are also about mix-maxing and DLC and microtransactions.
Every hobby has become a possible content creator career [for better or worse], but now there’s more content than consumers. Gemini and I also discussed the idea of “market movers” which is the name of an app that tracks sports (and Pokemon) card prices on a daily basis. This is to say, the “market mover” is an entirely unreasonable concept, especially when cards aren’t really assets at all. They are the avatars of our hopes and dreams tied up in a subject tainted by extreme nostalgia or popular sentiment. It’s why I finally got out of sports cards and only buy TCG cards when they get reprinted and super cheap and I can get my nostalgia fix for pennies on the dollar compared to the recent past.
More importantly and broadly, food and energy markets have been so manipulated that they are unrecognizable from even twenty years ago. And with the rise of on-demand meals like Factor, who needs to dine out? (I’ve even noticed some restaurants are just using the same ghost kitchens like the food delivery places do and so there’s not much differentiation other than the price and the ‘dining experience.’) I feel like this unreasonable approach to consumer spending isn’t sustainable, though. When will we finally wake up and prioritize the things we need to survive and allow our hobbies and diversions to return to their previous harmless status?
On Value Investing and Trading Cards…
… If I know my history correctly, Warren Buffett was part of the value investing movement. [Gemini would confirm this is correct, as Buffett learned from Benjamin Graham, author of The Intelligent Investor.] I will also say that while in retrospect that the stocks crashed, I would argue that many of those companies benefitted in the short term from these massive investments, and sadly the ones holding the “bag” in the end were the people losing their pension and retirement funds. Even today, we’re seeing outsized stock prices, which is why Emily and I exited the stock market after making major profits because bonds and high-yield savings and CD’s are just more practical once you reach a certain level of wealth. And I do think that SOME graded cards will actually stand the test of time, particularly the truly scarce top condition vintage cards and certain pop culture staples like Pikachu or Charizard, whereas the other 99% will become antique shop curiosities in forty years.
…And I already see people pivoting to eschewing grading altogether (especially as grading costs and horrible turnaround times make it impractical) and being super picky about who they collect. But it’s not a mainstream sentiment yet. I do, in fact, think that collectibles long-term WILL be a legitimate asset class, but only the top one percent of all subjects and then the top 10 or so percent of cards and collectibles related to that subject.
For example, I see Aaron Judge as the best investment in baseball cards today. He’s very likely to be a lifelong New York Yankee, he’s the best hitter of his generation, and a high likelihood to make the hall of fame. Shohei Ohtani might be the more valuable player overall thanks to his contributions on the basepaths and as a pitcher, but his prices are already so pumped that you’re not going to make money buying right now. As much as I’ve tried in the past to find steals in cards based on statistics, it rarely works out. Even if I’m right about the player’s future performance (and I often am), the cards rarely move. Let’s see your five questions and apply them to Judge, Shohei Ohtani, and Bobby Witt Jr (the best all around player in baseball today). Who will be the big “retirement” play in a generation? I’d say Judge.
I think Jeter is a great historical comparison, and there’s no doubt Judge will ultimately be a monumentally more valuable player than Jeter in the long run. (I don’t think Jeter’s fielding is as bad as the metrics say, by the way.) Home runs run the hobby. It is the best thing you can do ass a hitter, so if you hit a lot of them, you will do well. I don’t know that A-Rod, or even Barry Bonds, is the best comparable to Jeter, though, because their PED use (and other personality issues) have tainted their value in the hobby forever. The best comparison for Jeter would be Ken Griffey Jr, a “clean” player whose career second half was tarnished by injuries and yet was still a great “accumulator. However, Griffey’s long-term value is because he was the premier card in a historically relevant set (1989 Upper Deck) and because he was such an icon in the 90’s. Griffey was a better and more valuable player than Jeter ever was, even in his diminished injury-plagued years, but Jeter as the Yankee captain has more cultural clout. Once people like myself as a millennial, who actually saw Griffey at his best, are no longer around, who will be more fondly remembered in the hobby, Griffey or Jeter? Look how cheap the cards of legit home run king of all time, Hank Aaron, actually are in comparison to PSA 10 rookie cards of modern stars!
… I believe Judge is still an amazing long-term play even right now. He JUST won an MVP (2025) but because the Dodgers won back to back world series, Shohei is at the top of the hobby. And I think Shohei will go down as the best baseball player of all time, but there will be a point where his cards will come way down, just like Trout’s did. And it’s funny because the Angels play just outside of LA, but they’ve been irrelevant since Ohtani left. Trout is an aging player who’s barely an average contributor at this point. Shohei will probably be a long-term DH hitting 50 homers a year who might start a game pitching here and there. And Japan will always be a market for his stuff. Judge is the value play for me, as home runs will always sell. It’s funny because I’m a Red Sox fan, and yet, a Yankee (Judge) is my top target. I’m also quite fond of Mookie Betts, who already has more career WAR than Jeter ever did, and he’s Shohei’s teammate! His rookie cards are more expensive than Judge’s! And I love Mookie, but Betts, while a future Hall of Famer, is not Aaron Judge.
…I do think there being so many different cards will make this era of collecting very different. For example, Judge has a rookie card in 2017 Topps Update card number #US1 that features the rookie Judge in the home run derby. I think this is a good card that will probably age well, but there are so many variations of ‘Judge rookie card’ that I think everyone will have a favorite based purely on aesthetics; what will prevail in the end is pure supply and demand and the scarcest card will eventually rise to the top of the pile. Trout’s 2011 Topps Update rookie had the potential to be this generation’s 52 Mantle. But injuries and the Angels’ front office incompetence ruined that. Like Judge, Shohei has a lot of rookie cards to choose from. Most modern stars do. Funny enough I think the home run derby card, which is about $6 a copy in raw near-mint condition right now, is the greatest value play for Judge rookies, although his 2017 Topps Fielding variation (Judge is also known as an above average fielder) may end up being his most iconic, ironically enough more valuable than anyone than shows him batting (doing what he inevitably will be known best for).
December 28, 2025
Apparently, Joan Didion had a memoir called The Year of Magical Thinking about the death of her husband. That should be something to seek out.
I’m so exhausted that I don’t want to play games or do anything but lay here. I’ve already written some pretty heavyweight stuff and it seems like just after a couple hours of being conscious I’m ready to revert to unconsciousness. I have a gigantic task for this coming year, stripping away anything that doesn’t serve me in both my collections and my journals. I think the archives will be fairly safe, outside of the journals I need to extract for reading notes. I think by using [Obscure Curiosities] as a central hub for storing quotes and other thought provoking material, along with some of my own insights, I’ll stop being so overwhelmed with my penchant for saving every single thing that tickles my fancy. I simply don’t have the time or energy, no one does, to fully appreciate or absorb it all.
I listened to a very long article on my phone on Cooperstown Cred about Cole Hamels and his case for the Baseball hall of fame.
I’ve written at length about my fascinations with hall of fame voting, and the article I wrote for chronicles of Absurdia is one I’m likely to update this year coming as we start seeing qualitative narrative aspects of player careers become even more important than quantitative metrics, no matter how you slice them. Like Chris bodig, I don’t see Hamels as a hall of famer but also I can’t see a definitive reason why he shouldn’t be excluded; the biggest case against him is the four guys ahead of him are locks for the hall. And he doesn’t have the one team dominant pitcher for a bad team narrative of king Felix, who I think is a hall of famer if just barely. Remember a plaque is a plaque. They’re all equal.
