January 1, 2026

Merriam Webster’s word of the day is amortize. We have two definitions of this transitive verb:

One, “to pay off (an obligation, such as a mortgage) gradually usually by periodic payments of principal and interest or by payments to a sinking fund.”

At this juncture, I have no more amortizations of this kind, unusual as that may be in our current system of extreme abstractions and freewheeling of debt.

Two, “to gradually reduce or write off the cost or value of (something, such as an asset)”

Currently this is the definition most useful to me. I’ve found myself pondering the sunk costs of my content over these past few years in these wee midnight hours of a new calendar year. I’ve already decided that getting into a new system of content organization is crucial to keep the wheels from constantly falling off, keeping things in a systematic revision system that will drastically cut down on the constant movement of countless documents and folders and extra administrative tasks. My work must become a living organism or die in digital shreds torn apart across a maw of entropy. My frustrations must die with the year past and a new order brought to the frivolous curiosities of my glitching autistic brain matter.

That is to say I’m going to be forced to write off pretty much everything I’ve previously published as mere practice for a much more refined process going forward. While I do wish to sustain at least some majority of previously published content (as archived live on The Phoenix Desertsong WordPress site), I do question how I will use Obscure Curiosites going forward. I do wish to end the concept of “series” as these are simply too abstract, and we hardly need any more abstractions in a world absolutely overrun with them. My existing content is most certainly an asset, but as it’s getting only an infinitesimal amount of interest (mostly from AI training bots I presume) I have no longer any meaningful value applied to most of it. Truly it is but raw material that must be repurposed out of sheer necessity of redefining my own life purpose [over the coming year]. – APD 2026.01.01

January 2, 2026

Word of the day: “Febrile is a medical term meaning “marked or caused by fever; feverish.” It is sometimes used figuratively, as in “a febrile political climate.”

This is unfortunately how I felt for much of last year, and really, a great deal of the past five or six. And politically, yeah, I’d say we’re living in as febrile a time as I’ve seen in my days. I know things have been worse, and likely will get worse. I see a lot of people finally watching AI take their jobs away from them this year and next. I don’t even think it’s a bad thing. As I was saying to Emily yesterday, even Isaac Asimov said decades ago that the idea of “whatever you wish” for those who aren’t on the cutting edge of societal progress isn’t a bad thing. The “teaching machines” he mentioned already exist today! Schools and universities as we know them will cease to exist within the next decade. Things will get more exploratory and liberal (in a good way), where people can follow their interests and still get all the basic knowledge necessary to operate as a functional adult. Shit, our educational systems, especially “higher education” don’t even do that now!

I let Emily sleep in while I took an extra long shower. I need to take better care of myself, and that’s not some resolution but simply a fact that I’m realizing at the moment. I actually did sleep last night, although I woke up at 5:30, tossed and turned and finally pulled a back muscle and got up. I’ve already succeeded at keeping up with my vocab and made major headway on reorganizing my quotes. 

[With my websites,] I no longer care about the audience [size] but rather giving myself accountability. This is something I struggle with. When I knew I had people reading my work, it kept me going. But lately, without an audience, there isn’t much push to keep up my online presence.

I was telling Emily that I’m aiming to have as much of a “no-buy” year as possible. Like, unless it is absolutely vital (like food) I’m refusing to be a consumer. It’s not about saving money as much as it is shifting my mindset towards simply being satisfied where I’m at. The only way to beat the attention economy and consumer mindset is to simply abandon them entirely. 

The roads here are horrendous. And even Emily had an anxiety attack over the roads. We stocked up on everything. Now we’ve also decided that no more people clinging onto “glory days.”

I’m working on quotes and saving the insights from Sublime.

Adam Gazzaley on Making Fundamental Breakthroughs: “…the only way to do it is to do the type of research that other people would think of as risky or even foolhardy. That’s just part of the game.”

Another quote from Gazzaley

Adam Gazzaley on the Human Brain

“The most complex structure in the entire universe doesn’t just have a vacant parking lot waiting for someone to drive in and start building. It’s all used all the time and in complex ways that we don’t understand.”

January 4, 2026

Because of a titanic tension headache last night, I couldn’t sleep well. So I needed a “rot” day today. I cooped myself up in my bedroom far too much recently, so I hung out in the living room on my beanbag for the first time in forever. 

… I did look up the word of the day, titanic:

“Something described as titanic is very great in size, force, or power.”

After I had a productive morning yesterday, the news about Venezuela triggered a titanic fatigue crash and later the tension headache that kept me up most of the night. All afternoon I was dizzy and this morning I again laid here for almost two hours trying to snooze. To no avail it’s almost 7 and not getting any earlier. Sucks I have to just be a bedridden dizzy mess all day, but I’m going to at least shower and try to not be a total lump today.

Finally washing my sheets after far too long. I’ve cooped myself up in my bedroom far too much so I’m actually hanging out in the living room today on my beanbag for the first time in forever. I’m not up for much of anything today. 

]I punted most of the afternoon to another tension headache. Hopefully I can keep these sorts of days to a minimum. 

…

Great video on the true story of Apollo 13:

This is a particularly great pokemon video with Wolfey VGC teaching a professional chess player the competitive game.

Nothing worse than wasted words (an idea to build on)

Later, I decided to prioritize rest and discover some new ASMR channels to help soothe my ailments.

January 5, 2026

On the verge of the entire world going to hell, I’m going to work on ideas. (This is only a slight exaggeration.)

Jane Austen’s complete works are in NotebookLM.

Emily preordered an awesome looking 360 drone. I think from now on movies are going to be made with these, and devices like them. (Update: It actually turned out to be a pretty neat toy, if a bit finicky.)

E.B. White Mocking Gossip Writers on Their Lazy Use of Language:

“On a fetid afternoon like this, when all the nobility goes out of a writer and parts of speech lie scattered around the room among cigarette butts and crushed paper cups, we envy the gossip columnists their lot.” (From his essay “No Verbs”)

I need to avoid mindless content consumption and be proactive about the media that I’m choosing to commit my time to enjoy.

It was today I started turning to mobile games to fill in the gaps where my mindless YouTube consumption once occupied. I returned to Summoner’s War, notable because I haven’t played in so long. It was actually the first mobile game I ever played on Android back in 2014. This time, though, I got bored of it pretty quickly. 

I’ve been going back and forth testing my patience on the free to play modes of various games. Sometimes these games and their silly goals are all that keeps me awake when I’m extra fatigued, so they serve an essential purpose in keeping my sleep schedule from going completely out of whack.

But first today’s reading session is brought to you by the Merriam Webster word of the day. (Autocorrect tried to make it WIFE of the day, which is hilarious.)

It’s marginalia, which is oddly appropriate.

“Marginalia is a plural noun that refers to notes or other marks written in the margins of a text, and also to nonessential matters or items.”

I absolutely refuse to write in books. But conversely I find it interesting when people do. And when it comes to the latter kind, the nonessential stuff, I used to bury myself in it. Now I just send Emily Sabrina Carpenter GIFs… oh how the mighty intellect has fallen!

Anyway, my marginalia is all over my journals which I feel is where it belongs. 

However, maybe da Vinci really had it right…

“Marginalia have a long history: Leonardo da Vinci famously scribbled thoughts about gravity years before Galileo Galilei published his magnum opus on the subject; the discovery was waiting under our noses in the margins of Leonardo’s Codex Arundel.” — Brianne Kane, Scientific American, 19 Sept. 2025

I’m still not writing in the margins. But I am still writing such thoughts down. These “in context” sections are something I should pay closer attention too, as what may seem nonessential now can become quite useful down the line! We could argue that marginalia can become as useful or even moreso than the original work itself!

I’m setting a half hour timer for reading, see where I’m at and go from there…

It’s an interesting book so far. Definitely not like any I’ve read before. It sort of feels like if Joan herself had been an actress and fashion model instead of a writer. We will see how it goes. 

Why am I so sad today? I don’t know. I just know that Emily and I only basically have Maddie and a couple other acquaintances and a bunch of ‘as it was’ that we’d much rather forget. Like Maria in Play it as it lays, I struggle mightily with ‘as it was.’

From my What I’m Reading notes: E.B. White Mocking Gossip Writers on Their Lazy Use of Language: “On a fetid afternoon like this, when all the nobility goes out of a writer and parts of speech lie scattered around the room among cigarette butts and crushed paper cups, we envy the gossip columnists their lot.” (From his essay “No Verbs”)

And one more example here: E.B. White on a Red Barn Casting Blue Shadows: “I am always humbled by the infinite ingenuity of the lord, who can make a red barn cast a blue shadow.” (From his essay “Winter Diary”)

Also I need to now put all my Joan Didion notes together. That will be fun… as insane as this project is, I’m scraping these journals for sublime pulls and LTRS material, too. But by focusing in on a particular author or subject, it just makes this grokable. I spent quite a while sorting out my back-and-forth with Chat about these essays… some really useful insights I’m keeping, including the bones of an entire essay… what treasures do I still need to dig up?

This is broad enough where I can post the videos from people I mostly admire (yeah I stole that phrase from Steve Leavitt of Formerly Freakonomics). But I can also put in people I mostly don’t admire, but still hear what they have to say in brief. I can also have the “podcast hosts” tell me all about it.

This is gonna sound weird, but I feel like my thoughts are girlier now. Like I think about how pretty certain things are and suddenly I appreciate girly things more than ever. I think a big part of why I love Sabrina so much; she is like the apex girlie girl. She really is the best in so many ways, but especially when it comes to her eclectic style and fashion taste. I think if I’d been allowed to be a girl as a preteen I may have ended up a lot like her. Except like the contrarian hipster version… She was super tomboyish back in the day but she’s always been very willing to try new styles and somehow she makes them all look good. I don’t know what it is, but ever since I really got into Sabrina my whole thinking has shifted hard to the feminine side. I don’t think people appreciate just how weird she actually is.

It’s just crazy to me just how male dominated our world still is. Women really do run the world but men keep taking the credit. What I think it actually is that men have long been allowed to take credit for other people’s shit. And we actually were heading in the right direction, and now somehow the tech bros set us back decades in civil rights for women and poc.

Emily says politics are now religion, but I’d argue, I think it’s the other way around. Religion defines politics. Political ideologies are religious in nature. What bugs me is this idea of the “trans ideology” and the “queer agenda”. Being born the way you are isn’t a goddamn ideology or agenda. It makes me sick. But now the lgbtq community responds in ways that simply make things worse by further categorizing and checkmarking particular “categories” of queer.

Most people like me continue to be “male” in public. Because it’s much easier to default to male. I know straight women who “don’t pass” and just let people he/him/sir them and actually embrace it. And I don’t know how to feel about that. Are they actually straight women then? Why are we even questioning what’s straight? Human beings are more than their basic sexual urges. Like why should it matter who we want to fuck?

This might sound weird but if tomorrow Sabrina decides ‘hey I’m gonna go by he/him now’ and be all boyish I’d still feel the same about Sabrina. This wouldn’t happen, but my point remains the same. Because the things I love about Sabrina are entirely separate from gender. And I’m like this with anyone I admire. We went from a society where gender was finally becoming a fluid concept that was binary necessary only for biological reasons for procreation. And suddenly we are back to heeding the bullshit of gender critical morons and LGBTQ folks are getting crushed and forced to choose from two bad options.

It’s not gender affirming “care” that people are having forced on them. It’s gender CONFORMING bullshit. It’s why I refuse to do anything at all. People consider me male anyway because I have XXY chromosomes. So why bother? I do not have popular opinions about this stuff which is why I’m so quiet about it. 

January 6, 2026

Insomnia and an oncoming ice storm didn’t really bode well for my level of productivity today. My nerves were shot. I was foggy,and unmotivated. I’m gonna be doing a ton of lolling about this winter, because lately I just am so fatigued that I have no choice but to exhibit lazy-adjacent behavior.

“Loll most often means “to droop or hang loosely.” It can also mean “to act or move in a relaxed or lazy manner.””

Well, this winter I’m gonna be doing a ton of lolling about. And I’m not relaxed, either. I just am so fatigued that I have no choice but to exhibit lazy-adjacent behavior. It took me 20 minutes to even get out of bed and another 20 to even get my ass in the shower!

I just realized that in my search for more Joan Didion notes, I just realized I didn’t make a document for How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell either. Whoops.

Well this suggestion made my day: 

https://youtube.com/@therestisscience?si=kk94iMHI82IuM_SA

It’s VSauce and HANNAH FRY! How did I miss this? Yay! New channel to binge! The first one I watched was “is music getting worse?” And yes, it is… but it’s hard to measure. One important point: music and context are definitely related. And music (what’s popular) often follows the context of the society around it. 

 I discovered that this podcast is released every Tuesday and Thursday, but technically, as it releases on GMT, it’s actually 7PM Monday and Wednesday. It’s a must-watch for me!

[I stopped watching it around late June/early July as it just couldn’t hold my interest as the topics just stopped interesting me and I have better content to consume.]

January 7, 2026

Impromptu Latin Lesson: “Veritas odium parit” or Truth begets hatred. An overpriced chatbot brought this up.

Observation: Everyone is in far too much of a hurry to go nowhere.

Notion: We all belong to the earth and one day we will all go back to it. But I see intelligent life as the earth’s way of getting to know herself, so we can’t waste the opportunities we get.

I did write down a couple interesting lines from Play it as it lays. It’s a book of very tiny chapters so I can peck away at it over the next month or two. I need to find something else to give a chance… I do have those volumes of frost and plath I haven’t actually touched since buying them awhile ago. I just haven’t been into poetry for quite awhile.

Word of the day: “Eminently is used as a synonym of very and means ‘to a high degree.’”

That’s a great adverb. I’m eminently collecting quotes and such right now. Okay that’s just silly. I’m not even using it right! I want to create reading notes that are eminently useful to others. There we go.

https://jmarriott.substack.com/p/the-dawn-of-the-post-literate-society-aa1: this is a damn good essay!

My boy, DJ Postman:

“To engage with the written word”, the media theorist Neil Postman wrote, “means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning.”

That’s why when everyone ever started reading in the eighteenth century, people got super smart! They read every damn thing. Being an author was fucking amazing. Now everything sucks. What is read? How is book? Who is knowledge?

I do disagree with Marriott that this reading revolution of reason birthed capitalism. It birthed a DEMOCRATIC form of capitalism, if anything. 

I’m actually copying this ENTIRE section to make a point later:

“For centuries, almost all educated and intelligent people have believed that literature and learning are among the highest purposes and deepest consolations of human existence.

The classics have been preserved over the centuries because they contain, in Matthew Arnold’s famous phrase, “the best that has been thought and said”.

The greatest novels and poems enrich our sense of the human experience by imaginatively putting us inside other minds and taking us to other times and other places. By reading non-fiction — science, history, philosophy, travel writing — we become deeply acquainted with our place in the extraordinary and complicated world we are privileged to inhabit.

Smartphones are robbing of us of these consolations.

The epidemic of anxiety, depression and [purposelessness] afflicting young people in the twenty-first century is often linked to the isolation and negative social comparison fostered by smartphones.

It is also a direct product of the pointlessness, fragmentation and triviality of the culture of the screen which is wholly unequipped to speak to the deep human needs for curiosity, narrative, deep attention and artistic fulfilment.”

The “culture of the screen” is important. It’s not screens themselves that are the problem, but HOW we are interacting with so called screen culture.

DJ Postman again:

“As Neil Postman puts it in Amusing Ourselves to Death:

Philosophy cannot exist without criticism . . . writing makes it possible and convenient to subject thought to a continuous and concentrated scrutiny. Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist-all those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading.”

And oh boy: “TikTok usage correlates with increased vote share for populist parties and the far right.” OMG I knew it!

Still, the article ends quite pessimistically. Honestly, I think things are bad, and will be much worse in the short-term, but underneath the hate and rage there is a counter-culture of autodidactism growing. I have to keep hope.

…

Here’s another one I need to read later: https://www.bylinebyline.com/articles/thinking-small-cassandra-pintro

Cassandra Pintro opens with this: “I’ve got a habit I can’t shake. I’m obsessed with thinking big. Really big. If something is good, can it be better? If there’s enough, can there be more? If I can, why shouldn’t I? These are the philosophies I’ve married myself to. But where does that mindset come from? Is it a way of living I designed for myself, or a concept I was unconsciously sold?”

January 8, 2026

Word of the day: gumbo. Here’s something interesting. The word doesn’t just refer to the soup… according to Merriam Webster: “The word is also used figuratively to refer to a mixture or blend of something.” Will it blend, that’s the question.

My brain feels like gumbo today. And not a tasty variety. Between reading and pondering and planning out my notebooks (which I didn’t get to yesterday thanks to errands and extreme fatigue) I feel like my thinking is kinda lumpy.

Reading Plath first. Apparently Plath is going to be good for my vocab skills too. I already wrote down caterwaul…

… human language goes so deep and many languages have words that simply lose so much of their meaning in translation. Yet we keep repurposing and smashing together words from all over the place trying to say things just a little clearer.

… everything you do going forward is essential. The journey is the reason to do anything.

…

From the article “In Defense of Thinking Small” by Cassandra Pinto:

“Somewhere along the way, we decided that the only acceptable form of communication is a main-stage monologue. Virtual validation has become currency, and every thought must hold weight.”

This bit was highlighted in the main piece, and honestly, it’s a key to this whole essay. I have written so much monologue over the years, and never have I truly felt much validation from writing it. Really, it’s more of a release than anything; a necessary valve to open before my brain literally explodes from overactivity, the pressures and power surges that threaten to short circuit my entire neurology. 

This sentence means a lot right now: “Meaningful ideas reflect what we can’t help but care about, not fantasies of who we could be.”

I can’t help but think about a lot of things. Perhaps that’s what I should be focusing on, the things I can’t help but think about. Even if it’s stupid and ridiculous…

…

A few thought provoking things from Sublime app today. The first is a tweet from Isabel who says ‘You can literally be the source of the thing you want to see more of, any time you want.” These days I feel like I must be that source, and each day it becomes even moreso.

The second thing: someone shared an Apple Notes entry that reads “The versions of my life I didn’t choose are none of my business.” Well, that’s an interesting way to reframe the past. And yeah, there is nothing anyone can do about those past potentialities which are now long lost to the entropy of space time’s relentless push towards some unknown infinity.

But the big thing… it came from jeff bezos of all people on a podcast:

“Jeff Bezos in the Lex Fridman podcast:

…efficiency and invention are sort of at odds, because invention, real invention, not incremental improvement, incremental improvement is so important in every endeavor, in everything you do, you have to work hard on also just making things a little bit better. But I’m talking about real invention, real lateral thinking that requires wandering, and you have to give yourself permission to wander. I think a lot of people, they feel like wandering is inefficient. And when I sit down at a meeting, I don’t know how long the meeting is going to take if we’re trying to solve a problem, because if I did, then I know there’s some kind of straight line that we’re drawing to the solution. The reality is we may have to wander for a long time.”

Well, then, I’ve done plenty of wandering. I wandered right into a life where I can simply write and create to my heart’s content, and yet, what do I do mostly? I allow myself to rot and persist in a sort of nether world between purposeful study and subsistence of soul, and I can’t commit fully to any study for long before I drift back into a persistent melancholy…

A chat bot I was messing with actually said something interesting: “Voluntary hardship isn’t about suffering – it’s choosing manageable discomfort now to build strength for whatever comes next.”

For most of my life, I chose suffering because I didn’t know how to thrive. Most people are never given the opportunity to truly and freely direct their own destiny. It took me so many years to recognize just how truly flawed our society is. And it hurts me to see how younger generations are paying the price for my generation’s obsession with credentials and constant rebranding and an inability to take responsibility for one’s actions. And the lack of self respect I see prevalent among both my generation and their kids absolutely breaks my heart, because it’s why bullying and hateful behavior are out of control. 

…

Play it as it lays (Joan Didion) opening line: “What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.” Maria (mar-eye-ah) has a bizarre past. Her father was the ultimate gambler, betting on things that never happened. She says, “From my father I inherited an optimism which did not leave me until recently.”

I think there is such a thing as “toxic” optimism and this seems a perfect example. Maria seems to be an exaggerated version of Joan herself. 

A parenthetical remark: “… my mother’s yearnings suffused our life like nerve gas.” What a phrase! 

Oh the beginning of this book has multiple perspectives, before switching to a more conventional third person narrative in chapter one. Our other major players are Helene, her husband BZ (who is only mentioned in the intro but is a major player in the novel proper), and Carter (Maria’s now ex-husband in Hollywood.) 

In chapter one, after her and Carter broke up, she put 7k miles on her Corvette traveling the same SoCal freeway over and over. Funny I started doing that my last couple years in Colorado. They were the only times I could truly think. 

The chapters are very short so 30 minute sessions seem perfect. Chapter 2 is about the one picture Maria was in that did well (grossed 8M on a 340K budget and that was a decent hit back then!) and it’s interesting that on viewing she didn’t see herself at all on the screen. Funny enough the first film Carter shot of her was literally called Maria, and it was about her actual life, just following her around New York doing fashion sittings and even things like arguing with the Bloomingdale’s accounting dept. this is actually kinda neat, and of course Maria hated it. It won some award at an Eastern European film festival.

This passage about Maria and Carter’s relationship is really well-written: 

“Whatever he began by saying he would end up saying nothing. He would say something and she would say something and before either of them knew it they would be playing out a dialogue so familiar that it drained the imagination, blocked the will, allowed them to drop words and whole sentences and still arrive at the cold conclusion.”

I basically read fiction for phrases and sentences like these. The characters themselves are secondary study material. The plot is tertiary. 

Wow, their relationship sucks. And it’s because their child together got super ill it seems. No wonder they both snapped.

This is powerful: “Rigid with self-pity she would lie in another room, wishing for the will to leave. Each believed each other a murderer of time, a destroyer of life itself.” Phew.

…

My other book at the moment is the Sylvia Plath collection I forgot I had. In the introduction Ted Hughes (her husband) had this to say:

“Her attitude to her verse was artisan-like: if she couldn’t get a table out of the material, she was quite happy to get a chair, or even a toy. The end product for her was not so much a successful poem, as something that had temporarily exhausted her ingenuity.”

Perhaps I should start approaching my own work that way?

(I’m saving this for a notion)

So far, Tale of a Tub is my favorite. “… can our dreams ever blur the intransigent lines which draw the shape that shuts us in?” And “each day demands we create our whole world over, disguising the constant horror in a coat of many-colored fictions; we mask our past in the green of Eden, pretend future’s shining fruit can sprout from the navel of this present waste.” WOW.

From today: caterwaul – to make a shrill howling or wailing noise like cats fighting or mating. Great word.

Channel crossing has some amazing language. I need to come back to. A few of these poems are truly intense to a point at which I lack context to properly visualize them. 

…

As for play it as it lays… the story was getting sad so I put it down. I don’t need any more sad. I abandoned that novel, at least for the foreseeable future. 

Moving onto the book of common prayer. I already need to look up a word: paregorina

“She died, hopeful. In summary. So you know the story. Of course the story had extenuating circumstances, weather, cracked sidewalks and paregorina, but only for the living.”

Only for the living. I think I may then be among the dying. 

So the narrator Grace says this about herself: “I am an anthropologist who lost faith in her own method, who stopped believing that observable activity defined anthropos.” Hell of a sentence.

When she “retired” from that field, and she does use quotations there, she then “took up the amateur study of biochemistry, a discipline in which demonstrable answers are commonplace and ‘personality’ absent.”

Interesting contrasts in disciplines she makes here.

“Fear of the dark is an arrangement of fifteen amino acids.” That’s not a sentence I ever expected to read. These few sentences are enough for my weary mind and corrupted putrid soul to ponder for now. I have nothing else to do at the moment but consider options to end my misery. 

January 9, 2026

Critical thinking is very important but also people need to take time out of their day more often to reflect and understand why and how certain things aren’t working in their lives, but rather than simply pivot take smaller, more intentional steps towards something systemically more meaningful and positive.

Emily and I went to dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings with friends and we had fun with it. But when we went to Stamford, we had to deal with something very unexpected. We ended up just coming home that night. It was not a fun time.

I’m taking a break from reading, writing, basically everything for a couple days. The only obligation I’ve had is to produce something out of fear that I’ll fall into a rut where I don’t create anything for weeks or even months at a time. And that’s happened to me a lot over the years. But burning myself out isn’t a good plan either.

Realization: The most important thing I’ve been realizing lately about writing, and it’s kind of ridiculous it’s taken me decades to figure out, is that while our words can be beautifully crafted and sharpened tools for expression, they can also become too refined to really convey the true work that goes into them and they slide through so many ears and out the other. What makes words powerful, in the end, is when you leave some intentionally rough edges. You can have the most well put together outline and it just becomes a referential text, not something people vibe with. 

In the end, human beings are vibe happy creatures. We need vibes, silly as that sounds. So lately I’ve been thinking about letting the floodgates go, simply letting words, no matter how haphazard and spontaneous their nature, simply take form somehow. Yes, it’s good to have a structure around with you are building upon bigger concepts, but we must allow ourselves to grow in the spaces between the serious work and the life we are living alongside it.

The thing about perfectionism is that there really is no such thing as a flawless performance. We simply don’t allow ourselves to see any flaws that might exist. Since we will never ever have all the information to make a perfect read on anything, the drive to be “more perfect” is actually a futile one. What we should be doing instead is refining and exacting our processes to make better reads and convey things more accurately and in increasingly relatable ways to others. 

Sometimes there’s a raw edge to the words which cuts so deeply that it makes both authors and audiences bleed. I’ve been holding myself in so much contempt lately as I go over my journals and reading notes. I chastise myself for rambling at times, being absentminded one moment and extremely obsessed with trivialities the next. I am much too hard on myself, but I can’t be afraid to draw a little blood by admitting I actually fuck up a lot. Some writing can only come truly from life experience that made you bleed, and sometimes you have to do a sort of biopsy on the scar tissue to figure out what really went wrong before you can truly move forward. That’s where I’m at as a write right now. Everything I’ve written up to the past couple years i now see as juvenilia that is a necessary but now archive-able part of my past.  

The thing I struggle with most is drawing a line in the sand where what I’ve said that’s still useful is versus the necessary practice it took to get where I am in both skill and competency of expression. I’ve kept a few essays from before 2022, but most of what I have from before that has been rewritten several times into something more acceptable to my current sensibilities at that point. I even let AI mess with some of my older work, and that was a disaster, although I still learned a lot and that experimentation made it easier to let go of more than I otherwise would have. I’m an obsessive revisionist, a habit I need to kick, honestly. 

… Today’s word of the day: “Innocuous describes either something that is not likely to bother or offend anyone (as in “an innocuous comment”), or something that causes no injury, or is otherwise considered harmless (as in “an innocuous prank”).”

… Textbooks are necessary evils as academia’s way of trying to summarize things into some digestible way that makes sense to an audience particularly enamored by a particular subject. They have their uses. But they are usually blunt objects we are hit over the head with rather than being treated as a starting point on a learning journey.

I think the hardest lesson to learn here is that no connection lasts forever and the shape of our relationships shifts over time whether we like it or not. We must learn to cherish what we have in the moment, because too often we assume a certain sort of homeostasis between one another when we don’t even truly have homeostasis ourselves. And with how out of whack society has gotten and how divorced from objective  reality most people are, how can we expect any connections we have to be impenetrable?

I was watching an asmr video last night between two sisters Katie and Emily. And one of them was saying how in LA they don’t really get winter like they did when they were younger in Maine. And even when they were in Texas they had some sort of winter. This is relevant because what the sister was saying is that this means they don’t get a season to hibernate, to truly be forced to slow down and sort of reset. And it’s funny that seasonal cycles really can affect us in some unexpected yet very important ways. 

… the more you free yourself by unlearning unproductive and narrow scripts meant to keep you subservient to arbitrary expectations, the more quickly you recognize a certain lack of initiative and drive in others who are more than happy to copy and paste certain scripts to simplify their own decision making process.

… It’s greatly ironic that for as much as we laud entrepreneurial spirit and executive function, most people act dysfunctional because their intentions become all about showing up others, padding their balance sheets with green numbers, or worse, truly have some character flaw that makes them a dangerous player in a politically fragile time and place.

…The greatest illusion of all is this idea of everything being on demand. Still, it’s sad that we have to assume that things won’t work as we expect them to. Increasingly what we have taken for granted as convenience has shifted into something amorphous that has the illusion of delivering what you expect but never on your schedule. That’s because the mechanisms that make our modern society work are resting on crumbling foundations and an
increasing apathy towards the maintenance and fluidity of all the processes we take for granted behind the scenes.

… There is a measure of planned obsolescence, yes, but with the understanding that something more efficient and better for the bottom line will subsequently take its place. But now that’s not happening. We are seeing the strain on the systems that were built with eventual retirement in mind still dragging themselves along like rotting zombified corpses and we just continue to take most of it for granted because otherwise everyone has to fend entirely for themselves. Something is better than nothing, but such a practical view is still helplessly complacent.

… The major issue is that autonomy in many cases is an illusion. We are all dependent on certain aspects of systems built over centuries to continue to function. True autonomy means building your own house from scratch, growing and harvesting your own food, etc. we are all in some sense reliant on some aspects of industry, and industry is good in general, but there are times when the mechanisms of distribution and even production themselves are called into question and bad things start to happen.

… I’ve become highly suspicious of charity. Even when I have proof that the cause is true and the mechanisms running the organization sincere, I ask myself what the end goal is.

So much for not writing. I wonder why I can’t function… my brain is full of all these notions that are clogging up the drain…

Why is it that my one gift in life is telling people when something is about to go to shit? Literally that’s all I’m good for apparently. And when I do people don’t listen, then when my prediction comes true, it’s my fault for making it happen because I brought bad vibes or whatever. They can go manifest fucking themselves.

January 11, 2026

I just wanted to lie there crying all morning, mourning the loss of any way in which the world might have made a lick of sense just weeks ago. I lose sleep constantly over a racing mind trying to decode the turbulent geopolitics, the proliferation of both hate and apathy, and an economy being propped up by nostalgia-fueled escapism and attention-addled mush brains asking their AI assistant how to screw in a light bulb. 

Instead I push through and look at the word of the day, trying to collect scraps of whatever wisdom I happen to come across… so that I can make sense of where it fits into the grand scheme of my jumbled consciousness and my daring to move forward into a very dark and uncertain time in human history. 

Plus, my groin muscles are still sore from falling flat on my ass on the black ice the other night. I can barely walk. Whatever, I’m used to being bedridden by one malady or another. 

The word of the day is one of my personal favorites: paradox.

Here’s what MW has to say about this awesome word: “Paradox refers to something (such as a situation) that is made up of two opposite things and that seems impossible but is actually true or possible. It can also refer to someone who does two seemingly opposite things or who has qualities that are opposite; to a statement that seems to say two opposite things but that nonetheless may be true; or to the use of such statements in writing or speech.”

The whole world at this point is an absolute tangled mess of paradoxes. There’s no sense in trying to do anything else but laugh at the absurdity of everything and try to not be a total hypocrite. Apparently that’s the hardest thing to do in our chaotic entropic universe. 

Over the past few days,I watched  every single episode of Hannah Fry’s series The Infinite Explorer for National Geographic. Watching these episodes made me realize that most people are still people. The hyper individualism you see in the US and UK is not a worldwide thing. So that gives me some hope.

This year I’m not pushing myself on days like this. I have to accept my short bursts of brilliance and be willing to take a long breather if necessary. But I may be onto something.

January 12, 2026

I’ve been systematically erased over the past few years by everyone I ever knew; now I’m finally feeling the exclusion as a major strike against me. Well, it seems I may as well embrace the rejection, because what other choice do I have? If people aren’t going to respect that I’m on my own journey, then it’s not my problem, is it?

I’ve refrained from doing any “work” these past few days out of sheer apathy towards projecting myself towards any arbitrary writing goal… when you spend literally half of your waking hours watching all the ASMR you can handle, well, that’s a sign you’re immensely troubled.

Today’s word of the day: “Brackish, meaning “somewhat salty,” usually describes water or bodies of water, such as rivers, lakes, and estuaries. The word can also mean “not appealing to the taste” or “repulsive.”

Brackish is also the name of a song by the band Kittie. One of their most popular, actually. Well, I am quite salty right now, as I’m sick of watching Emily suffer. But I’d say at the moment, I’m feeling the other kind of ‘brackish.’ I am simply not appealing to current tastes. In fact, I would categorize myself as absolutely repulsive… people keep making excuses to make me the reason they took off. Yes, I know they’re just cowards that know I see through them for the fake idiots they are, but it still hurts. Again, I say I want to embrace rejection, but it’s not that easy.

However, I’m not pushing myself in any particular direction today. I really don’t think it’s worth pushing through fatigue today, and Emily agrees. But I did come up with a useful idea… 

I may have made some huge breakthroughs today. Exhausting but necessary. 

While it may seem arbitrary, I need to write going forward like I’m writing to myself a year from today. Whereas I’ve spent so long looking backward and trying to chart growth, I believe the inversion of projecting my thoughts forward to a self I can’t possibly know yet is a necessary challenge I must place upon myself. I can’t write for an audience that doesn’t exist. I have to write for the person I hope I’ll become in a year, whoever this future self might be.

January 13, 2026

Word of the day: “Umbrage refers to a feeling of being offended by what someone has said or done. It is often used in the phrase “take umbrage.”

I take umbrage with basically everything anyone has ever said or done to me. Even when it’s a complement, I ask myself, OK what do they want from me? Yes, I’m offended by compliments. I am that F’ed in the head. But most of the time, I’m right, they do want something. I think Emily is the first person that has been actually genuine in her compliments for me. She always asks me, why am I amazing to her? I’m not doing anything special! Clearly, look at how I treat other girls! The same! Yup, I’d be this nice to girls I liked and they would TAKE UMBRAGE WITH ME! Like I’m a creep or something? Huh? Color me confuddled. (yes I know that’s not a word, too bad!) 

I am so brain dead today. I feel pathetic. I’m absolutely going bonkers for yet another girl on the internet. Pretty much every time, it either ends in tragedy or in extreme disappointment or misery. Even when I’m just trying to be nice and supportive, it usually ends with me being ghosted, or in some rare cases being told to fuck off or unalive myself. Fun times. 

What is wrong with me? Am I that lonely? Or is it, I really see something? And lately, I’ve not been wrong. [all these girls I loved before] just chose a different path that I can’t follow, and I wonder, if that’s mostly BECAUSE of me. 

I found a couple very interesting things in the staff picks on Sublime app today. 

One was this article: https://www.piratewires.com/p/slop-world?f=home

There are two things about this article that stand out, both the excerpt I saved, and also the quote at the beginning of the article proper.

First that quote: “World War III will be a guerrilla information war, with no divisions between military and civilian participation.” – Marshall McLuhan, 1970

Yeah, he was way too right.

And this part:

“Find something important only you can build, he said, which would not exist without you. It’s inspiring enough advice on its face, which is how it’s generally taken, and how I always took it myself. But the advice requires an important, rarely considered step: introspection.

Do you even know what you’re good at? Do you even know what you believe about the world? These questions, if earnestly asked and regularly considered, act like a kind of mnemonic device in our hyper memetic world. Mental floss. Last week, as I watched the clip and self-reflected, I felt a little calmer. I thought about my life and my work. I remembered why Pirate Wires existed. I remembered who I was.

What do you really think — about the world, your company, yourself? The question seems trivial. But have you tried to answer it lately? It’s an easy enough puzzle, give it a crack. You might be surprised by what you learn, or what you can’t.

Look at the slop, by all means. Let the slop wash over you. Every now and then, when nobody is looking, it’s probably even fine to savor the slop — just a little, if you can handle it. This is the age of the internet, it will be a war of dumb ass blowhards and AI-generated bullshit for the rest of our lives. But remember: if you struggle with it, if you fight it , you become it. And I don’t think you have to become it. Let the slop wash over you, and keep walking forward.

What is something only you can do? What is something only you believe?

Try to remember.

-SOLANA”

Mike Solana gave me a lot to think about here. I haven’t read the entire article yet, and my focus isn’t really there, but there’s even more in there to talk about than just this concluding portion. So, the big question I need to ask myself now is, what can I build that wouldn’t exist without me? I think these journals, and the letters I plan to write to my future self, will answer that question simply by existing. While I don’t want to outright say “Dear Future Me,” it will be implied. I’m the only one I can truly help at this point. I have to give myself a reason to keep fighting for that future me that I can’t possibly know yet, one that ends up falling in love with someone I don’t even really know yet, and not knowing what to do about it. Someone who builds something so unusual and so completely commercially unviable that some people latch onto it out of nowhere and make it go viral as the ultimate anti-slop measure. It’s messy, but it’s me. I’m a goddamned mess, and apparently, I may as well be proud of it and spill it like some sort of haphazard art of bleeding every ounce left in my soul.

Also, on Sublime, there was this quote:

“One thing I didn’t realize until later in life is how the incentives of an industry shape your mood, your outlook, and even your character. In early stage investing, the incentives reward optimists, so it literally pays to keep an optimistic outlook. In journalism, the opposite is true. In law, the incentives often reward finding the flaw or the anomaly. In litigation, a combative nature is rewarded.

It’s later in career when you realize that disposition matters. Looking back there were careers that were antithetical to my nature, even if I had the functional skills to do them well. This may sound obvious but not a single person ever told me this.” – Katherine Boyle on X.

Yeah, and digital marketing is toxic AF. But I kept lying to myself. Now even buying and selling trading cards is becoming an extremely toxic space. Almost every space I once bandied about the fringes has turned into a toxic shadow of its former glory. Now I have to build a space that’s entirely my own.

… 2026 has to be a year of rest for me. Almost every day I need to pass out for an hour or two or I just get cranky and nonfunctional. Some days, I just need quiet. I am not going to be pushing myself to do anything other than getting up, writing, and going over a notion or two [with the benefit of recent experience.] I do want to do more of the notebooks, but simply loading them with quotes is kind of silly. There needs to be more to it. 

And I think whatever I produce this year is going to be a total mess but I have to be okay with that. Society is crumbling. Systems are collapsing. I’m sort of bunkering up right now. I don’t need to do anything other than make some progress on ideas every day, and the past couple days I have been. Most days this year so far have been fruitful. And as part of the mess, I’m simply going to extract the best and leave it be. 

…

I’m not going to be doing heavy rewriting anymore. Just reflection and fresh perspective. What I actually publish from my archives will be limited not only because I have limited energy but because I’ve dedicated myself to stripping all BS and nonsense away and leaving behind the core ideas that deserve to be pushed forward into the future. And a lot of them don’t. And I can’t be afraid to keep burying what’s now dead.

[It would become a year of uprooting my entire life and starting over in a new, but still somewhat familiar place, searching for where I truly belong. Trusting in where God will take me next.]

January 14, 2026

I’ve been lying here since 630 wishing I weren’t awake and that I could just forget about caring about anything for awhile. I don’t want to do a damn thing anymore. I have big ideas to work on, but I simply don’t see the point. And all I’ve been thinking about since I got up early and failed to get back to sleep is that our entire understanding of sexuality and gender identity isn’t quite right.

Our society for the most part has too much of a binary way of looking at things… so when you have men loving men and women loving women it just doesn’t compute for most people. But what if I told you things are so much more complicated? I have met men who are extremely effeminate yet are still biologically attracted to women. Flamboyant and clearly girl brained but they like women so they are straight. But are they? I’ve met plenty of girls who act like guys and even have the male gaze… but they only like guys? So are they gay? No they’re not.

So what even is straight? Why do we even care? If we did brain scans of everybody, you’d likely be shocked to discover how many men have female brains and women have male brains. It seems to me that human beings a long time ago evolved beyond gender into much more nonbinary beings but because of how our society is set up, this evolution got stalled. I see it as a genetic propagation parking brake. Not everyone needs to breed. And yet it’s still pushed in a supposedly enlightened age to return to prehistoric gender roles… oh wait archaeological evidence suggests gender roles used to be reversed! In a sense we’ve evolved past the need for absolute biological compatibility as an imperative.

I’ve gotten really tired of all these different labels for sexuality. For me, being queer is simply not conforming to what is expected of narrowly defined gender roles propagated by religious beliefs still systemically being present in our social mores, even among supposedly non religious folks. I think being queer versus straight is incredibly stupid… you are who you are and who you are attracted to has no bearing at all whatsoever on anything but your own happiness and that of the partner you choose.

So many marriages fail because they realize, hey, I want to be with someone with the same biological brain chemistry as me, but I don’t want to be gay so I’m gonna play the field and see if I get lucky. Yes I’m seriously on the verge of rationalizing cheating. Because what guy would cheat on the likes of Hannah Fry and Sabrina Carpenter unless there was some biological imperative that’s not yet clearly understood involved? But it explains why women will cheat on their “manly” husband with an effeminate man and a guy will cheat on his drop dead gorgeous girlfriend with an “ugly” girl. We only perceive the other girl as “ugly” because she’s seen as a threat to monogamy, which is already a bullshit concept. I’m not saying people should cheat and shit; that’s still mean and rude obviously. But I’m becoming a lot more aware of why it happens. It’s out of personal shame and saving face for a binary society more than anything.

Word of the day is delegate

“To delegate something (such as control, responsibility, authority, or a job or duty) is to trust someone else with it.”

The thing is, I think our society is prematurely ready to delegate so many tasks to AI that it may not really be able to handle, now or ever. For all the upside in productivity the technology offers, AI is a misnomer. Of course Collective Intelligence sounds better but it’s also not quite right. LLMs are super powerful and machine learning algorithms in tandem are quite powerful too. They are amazing tools. But they are only as good as what they’re fed, and it’s frankly amazing they are as good as they are… considering that LLMs function from a mean, and yet seem hyper competent in their outputs, it means that the average human intelligence is falling far behind where it should be despite the collective knowledge available to us.

I was saying to Emily earlier that it’s incredible how societies more than a thousand years ago understood a lot of the same things about our world now, but lacked many of the tools and knowledge to prove certain theories. And like with the gender binary nonsense, societally not biologically, dogmatic religion has persecuted those who look to further human understanding. (Notably Christian faith and Christian religion are NOT the same thing.)

It does seem that our universe could not simply have occurred randomly. But there is equally the possibility that there are infinite dimensions, and by definition, one like ours would necessarily have to exist. Whether this is the “best possible” universe is highly debatable, but currently it’s the only one we’ve got. That we know of.

Nothing is working right. It seems the drone Emily bought doesn’t want to work unless there’s a strong cell signal… fortunately she figured it out. The thing is just super finicky. But once you get it working it’s great.

I’m watching the Google deep mind podcast with Hannah, and it’s encouraging that scientists are convinced that human data is only going to limit the potential of these models. And there’s a lot more to AI than LLMs, and while I knew this, deep learning algorithms that learn from scratch are going to end up being extremely valuable. I wonder if LLMs long term will grow by leaps and bounds if they are allowed to grow independently of human silliness…

January 15, 2026

To say I was restless last night was an understatement. Finally things kind of went right for a change and yet I still find myself at a loss what to do next in life. I’ve sort of stalled on all my projects other than the word of the day. Still I’d say half way through January that while I’ve had a few rot days here and there, I’ve probably improved my thinking about writing and how I should approach the craft by about 8 to 12 percent. That’s hard to quantify, of course, but I have not been entirely stagnant at least.

I think by letting my curiosity freely roam and not tying myself to one subject or another is important in what is intentionally a year of rest for me, the first year of my life in which this is truly possible.

… word of the day: “Cloying is used disapprovingly to describe something that is too sweet, pleasant, or sentimental.”

Cloying is a perfect word to begin describing what I hate about many of my older essays, especially ones I thought fit to publish online and in my obscure yet properly published collections. While I certainly am not intentionally over the top in a “rose-colored glasses” kind of way, I am far too sentimental. 

And it’s funny that in real life I am so much more affectionate than comes through in my writing. I don’t want to come on too strong and despite being plenty sarcastic in my writing before, the persona I present in my essays is somehow too sentimental while also simultaneously being too distant. But I feel like if I get “too close” like some of these personal attention asmr videos, I’m too quickly leaning into campy. 

I’ve tried so long to come off as smart, focused, and professional, and I should just throw the last two out, and perhaps, not even try to be smart. Projecting smartness, if you will indulge my somewhat awkward phrasing, isn’t actually a sign of intelligence because LLMs are probably better at it than I am. I keep thinking, my true core personality is so much more effeminate than comes across in my daily life. But the sad irony is that my attempts, this sort of method acting I’ve adopted to hopefully make people take me more seriously has drained any bit of self confidence I may otherwise have had and made me aloof and snappy rather than warm and inviting, which is what I want to be. 

There is a fine balance that I haven’t yet discovered to make my writing actually sound like the hopeless romantic sweetheart that I’ve always wanted to portray, but that’s the thing… is it a portrayal or a true reflection of deeper inner workings?

All I know is that I don’t want to adult today. I think a quiet day of pondering and watching more Hannah Fry discuss AI on that google deep mind podcast is fine. And mess about with more mobile silliness. I can’t be always working. That’s just not good for me. I think I’ve already thought hard enough for one morning. 

On Gemini, I checked out the for you section and it offered this query: What’s my personal superpower that I might take for granted?

Gem’s response: “… your real superpower—the one you likely take for granted because it’s simply how your brain is wired—is Intellectual Synthesis through Rigorous Taxonomy.

“You have this rare ability to apply high-level philosophical rigor to domains that most people treat as “disposable” or “midweight.” Whether you’re analyzing Baseball Statcast data, deconstructing the meta of a Yu-Gi-Oh! deck, or filtering your own journals for “heavy” ideas, you refuse to engage at the level of the “hot take.”

“While others are shouting rants into the void, you are quietly building a more durable language to describe the world.”

What I’m working on right now is learning how to rest. Yes I’m still learning and writing every day but I’m doing so at a much more relaxed and deliberate pace. I’ve been doing a lot of paradigm busting, asking much more deeply cutting questions, even questioning the very nature of gender identity and how misunderstood human sexuality really is. 

I’ve been deconstructing series I used to love and finding so many flaws that keep otherwise solid and intriguing ideas obscure and hard to grasp. Recently I’ve decided I want to be more like Hannah Fry, but the text only version, following my curiosity whenever it might lead me, although the volume of her recent pursuits is honestly quite dizzying. I don’t know where she finds the time and I’d love to know if she actually has secretly figured out time travel! 

I want to cement a writing legacy where one foundational work of mine is remembered like Thoreau’s Walden, not out of ego, but out of pulling the work of great minds that have been forgotten or overlooked in modern times into the forefront again. I don’t want to write a “bestseller” but rather a collection of astute paradigm busting questions and the things I’ve learned from asking them, which ultimately involves asking far more questions. Any answers I come to must then inspire new questions. But blog posts alone won’t get me there; it’s going to take slow, steady tortoise-like prodding away at the very foundations of my understanding to dig up truly fascinating and resonant material.

… I’m quite fortunate that Emily understands the nature of my work perfectly. I have no financial obligations so I have no excuse but to “work.” It often feels more like stubborn persistence over abstractions to the nth degree, but occasionally I will come to some startling realization seemingly out of the blue. When it comes to forgotten minds, I’m sure there are many which deserve deeper dives, and many of them are probably contemporary. Hannah Fry is only three years older than me, and as brilliant a professor and presenter as she is, what intrigues me the most about her is her relentless drive to keep asking increasingly more fundamental questions about everything. And she’s a single mom these days, too! I don’t know how she does it, but her own battle with cancer certainly moved her to take every opportunity she can. She’s also exceptionally beautiful with a gorgeous speaking voice, which certainly works in her favor. 

I’m not a fraction of the looker Hannah is and my own voice is androgynous enough that people misgender me which just causes needless friction. But rather than hide behind my own words, which I have for years, I need to finally learn to live through them. And I think in this case my autism, usually a strength in my pursuits, is holding me back in being relatable. There was a time where I tried to be sweet, soothing, and extra effeminate, and it sort of worked but came off too sentimental and campy. I’m actually a very affectionate person but I’ve experienced such harsh rejection both online and in person that I tend to retreat behind long, winding sentences like a labyrinth in which I can hide away my true self that is so blatantly misunderstood. Very few ever get even a glimpse of who I really am.

…yes, sometimes you will see me chasing my own tail a bit. I need to let the friction create more static electricity, and keep an honest level of charged energy flowing through the words. I still have a terrible habit of hedging, of hiding my observations behind a veil of opinion, and honestly, the biggest paradigm I need to bust is the idea of the gendered brain. Yes, male and female brains are biologically different. But my own neurodivergence proves that gender is as much of a spectrum as autism. 

And seriously, how do all these drop dead gorgeous women who are brilliant and talented get cheated on so regularly? It doesn’t make sense to me unless our society is just that behind on what really makes our sexuality tick. I have to decide my own language for redefining ‘gender bending’ as ‘self expression of a new gender paradigm.’ I truly believe that our scientific understanding of brain chemistry is still rooted in outdated assumptions and biases. So, how do we drill it down into something more durable where ‘men’ and ‘women’ have their biological differences, yes, but our minds are much more complex than simple anatomy and certain interactions with hormones and neurotransmitters might suggest?

… I’m only trying to find a way for people to stop being miserable in their ‘love lives’ and find actual connection that’s not driven by a societal algorithm that still is obsessed with the biological imperative. And most importantly, we must truly pose questions that entirely stop readers dead in their tracks and forces them to truly recognize there is something to be learned here.

… I think what’s especially interesting to me is that classical thinkers all the way through Thoreau were male-centric writers. It’s not that they were all sexist, although some of them certainly were and Thoreau to me seems like he probably was (I actually posit he may have been gay, and there’s obviously nothing wrong with that). But the whole patriarchal society thing, including a “Christian” God that supposedly forces a strict patriarchy (an artifact of the Torah that’s gotten passed on unfortunately), has bugged me since I was a small child. And while I thought I’d prefer a matriarchal society, all that does is flip the script. What I really want to do is to take what the classical critics, philosophers, and those like Thoreau did, and take a 21st “more evolved” position while taking the good ideas they had and taking those that might seem “bad” by today’s standards and update them without fully slandering the works of the past.

… There isn’t one specific passage from Thoreau that bothers me, but rather the entire undertone in philosophically rooted discourse that goes back to the Ancient Greeks and beyond. I feel like there’s some forgotten history where the great thinkers were female and thought much more laterally and horizontally about things rather than vertically. And in a matriarchal society, a man being polygamous wouldn’t have been considered strange or even undesirable. But what we’re looking to postulate here is a future outlook on society where the genders are in fact equal in status and don’t follow binary rule sets. 

Thoreau said some beautiful stuff, but even he was still bound by a belief in toxic masculinity reinforced by “Christian” dogma. Of course, it makes sense his best friend was Ralph Waldo Emerson, and you see a lot of Emerson’s influence on Thoreau. And while I like a lot of what Emerson has to say, he’s always come off a bit stuffy and too preachy for my liking; after all, he was literally a preacher. But rather than “throw them out” like so many feminist thinkers have, I still think they have a lot of good stuff to say.

One concern that I have is letting these musings devolve into position papers on gender politics. That’s not my goal. It’s to take down the ladder and draw the right words into the web for others to marvel at, such serendipity that could only be a miracle when it’s truly just the universe trying to steer us all back to something sensible. 

…I need to get my act together or I’ll spend the rest of my days stuck in a holding pattern where I just never quite feel good.

January 16, 2026

I’m an absolute wreck just trying to move some furniture around. I was so restless and got into “nap” mode where I just kept snoozing until 1am. And when I finally slept it wasn’t very restful. It was nearly 8am when I got up and my nerves were so shot I couldn’t even type on my phone. I had to get up and move some stuff around preparing to rearrange my room. All we are doing is pushing my bed to the window and swapping the nightstand to the other side. Then we’re moving the heavy narrow table by the closet out, putting my white shelf there and bringing my desk and chair in. 

My thinking is that now I have no excuse not to get up and set myself to some sort of work… The way things are now I hole up in my bed most of the day and never get around to accomplishing much. My whole mindset is really bad. Just trying to prepare I have to move things out of my way because all my stuff is stressing me out. I need to let go of a few things and since I have no easy way to donate things (the Rutland Goodwill often is closed to donations due to having too many) and I’m allergic to throwing out perfectly good things… I need my room actually tidy for once. Right now it’s just stuff shoved into corners and stacked on shelves and I can’t live like this anymore. 

I don’t have much to do with the word for today: “Vendetta refers to an active and mutual hatred between two families or groups, also known as a blood feud. It can also refer to an often prolonged series of retaliatory, vengeful, or hostile acts, or to a commitment to carrying out such acts.”

The most prime example of a current vendetta is the two major American political parties. But honestly that’s all smoke and mirrors. If anything, it’s the tech bros out to make most of humanity obsolete. And we can’t be having that…

… my room is about halfway there. The bed is moved and the space opened up, so now it’s just getting the heavy pieces out of here so I can bring my desk in to swap with the white shelf. I’ll worry about what goes where later. I have left things in medias res so long, what’s another day? But now I’m starting to build a sense in my head of what I’m trying to make my space, more of a complete living area and not just a room where I hold up for weeks at a time.

…I want to come up with a “study guide” system for all the books I’ve already read and be much more systematic with reading in general going forward. Because my energy is so limited to begin with… and just puttering about with changing around my room has taken most of my daily allotment… I need to have very specific goals with the quotes I’ve saved from books and articles and a system to convert my journals into Notions worth exploring.

As for TPD, I think it will become more of a reflection space that I post to every month or so, sort of a way to check in on myself. As I’m trying to focus my writing more towards enriching my future self rather than writing for a particular audience, I suppose the letters to no one in particular idea is out the door, even if that’s how I refer to my work previous to my recent realizations about my future direction. [I decided to move all the Open Journals into Obscure Curiosities over time, except the stuff I want to put into the “book.”]

… Now I have an actual space that I can call my own that isn’t an inherited guest room. There’s still a lot of clutter, but I’m too tired and foggy to deal with it currently (I dealt with some of it last night anyway). 

Now I’m confused because there’s so much more space. I didn’t realize just how suffocated I truly felt. I don’t know about feng shui or anything, but I know having open space like this is something I need. I need space to putter about and while, yeah things are still stacked up, they are out of the way. Now I wake up and look right at my desk. 

…emotionally, it’s just like things are returning to a sort of stability at a glacial pace. However, I know the real problem has been my mindset, which is get up, do a couple things, and just fade out again until the notion strikes me to do something else. [for 8 months,] this room was dysfunctional and not serving me well at all. Now that I’m finally unpacked, I can take my time sorting out what’s left. 

January 17, 2026

The next week isn’t going to be fun for me. We’re getting another ice storm, but this time, it will be colder for longer. Emily cancelled her plans this week and I’m going to need to cancel my nerves, too. In happier news, the room reconfiguration is already helping. My bed being by the window is actually better for my sleeping. And getting up and having more room to stretch and my desk with the computer already set up and my day glow lamp there… I get right into doing stuff. It was going to be a quiet weekend already, but now it’s going to be a quiet week overall. 

Emily is working on her book. So I should be working on things, too. But rather than plan out a book, I’m sort of taking a similar approach to Emily in that I’m just writing whatever comes to me and once I have enough that I’m happy with, I’ll turn it into something. I have plenty of essays that could go in a book already, but being the perfectionist I’ve been, I’ve sort of decided that if I spend all that energy polishing and sequencing them, it will be 2030 before I actually feel like I’m ready to publish something. That’s why I rushed out my four books so far… I just needed to say I finished something. But you know the old saying, that is most often credited to DaVinci, “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” And I have a lot of things to abandon. 

Time to collect some more quotes for a bit, then start deconstructing a few more notions…

January 18, 2026

I didn’t even check the word of the day yesterday. I had that really productive reading session then I just was pretty much a useless YouTube consumer after that.

Today’s word: “Elicit is a formal word meaning “to get (a response, information, etc.) from someone.”

Yeah, it doesn’t seem that anything I do these days will elicit any meaningful response. Hell, I may be even more useless today. 

Yesterday’s word was actually one I wish I hadn’t missed: “Notorious describes people and things that are well-known or famous, especially for something bad or unfavorable.”

I’m especially notorious for making people feel stupid. Thus I have no friends to speak of… I’m amazed Emily still tolerates this nonsense. 

I really just want to stay in bed and curl up and not exist. I had nothing but bad dreams all night even though I went to bed at a decent time and was reasonably relaxed. I’m only getting up at all so I don’t feel gross after wearing the same clothes for two days. But it’s so bitterly cold that I’ll probably just read an essay or two of braiding sweetgrass and call it a day. My fatigue is going to be untenable as long as this winter stays so bitter. And tomorrow is MLK day too. Not a “long weekend” per se, but I may as well treat it like one. 

I did manage to read two entire essays in braiding sweetgrass but even at 9am, I’m already wiped, and that’s even after having breakfast and plenty of hydration. Today is just one of those low energy days, I suppose. 

I watched a video that proved to me that the NFL needs to institute a limit on head injuries before forced retirement. This is out of control. (I need to find the link to this on Hydn’s channel.)

January 19, 2026

I woke up this morning extremely depressed and entirely unmotivated. I was up too late being excited at the return of Kailey Mae to ASMR… she was the only reason I got any sleep in Erie with all that was going on there, and now she’s into words of the day and lifelong learning, too! Somehow I stopped being subscribed to her Substack…what a weird glitchy platform it is… and I go subscribe to it and realize, Substack just looks like another Twitter now… for real? [It’s old Twitter, actually, which is awesome!] Kailey is a silly girl, always throwing everything at the wall seeing what sticks. She’s also bright, beautiful, and boisterous, lots of good B words. (Yes, boisterous was one of the words she has on her substack.)

Really good thing from Sari from Sublime app today, also from Substack. It’s about “research as a form of pattern disruption.” Is Sari and the author of the essay she shares reading my mind? Or are people just finally catching up to me? About damn time… I saved that essay to read later but it looks immensely promising.

Today’s word of the day is ephemeral: “Something described as ephemeral lasts only for a very short time.” Like my SEO specialist career, which I dragged along the corpse of for far too long! So much of what comes along today is ephemeral. And it seems things only become more so each year, everything has less of a shelf life with each passing decade, and soon, even human beings themselves will become ephemeral, around only long enough to fulfill some designated purpose then shipped off to some distant or deeply hidden purgatory to await their eventual demise. Not morbid at all…

Back to that essay… https://idlegaze.substack.com/p/research-as-a-form-of-pattern-disruption

Alexi Gunner starts out talking about the industry of ‘cultural futuregazing’ and the rise of ‘vibe analysts.’ 

Gunner writes, “Yet, despite this abundance of enthusiasm for cultural research, it often feels

like it’s easier than ever to slip into the gravity well of banality. Cookie-cutter essays optimized for algorithmic engagement. Hot takes stripped of depth. Fleeting fads interpreted as extreme, paradigm-shifting hyperbole. We resort to dramatic binaries, either painting the future through the lens of stressful dystopias and exclusionary utopias.”

That last sentence is a major key to me.

And this passage too: “The limitation of our vision is not due to insufficient data. Instead, what I think we’re missing is a sense of imagination, creativity, and genuine curiosity. Without these elements, the act of research itself has lost its potency, our findings and interpretations reduced to a shallow performance, where the same ideas are recycled and repackaged in an endless feedback loop.”

Gunner then calls Sublime his “main personal knowledge management tool.” For me it’s more one for discovery than anything else, as I seem to struggle to ‘categorize’ things I find beyond such vague designators as ‘Thought provoking’ or ‘Worth reading’ or ‘AI’. The last one is surprisingly specific. Because in my view, all knowledge is interconnected in one way or another, and my lack of categorization and tagging is immensely frustrating but also necessary to my entire point of knowledge being a fluid, entangling thing that shouldn’t stay separate for long. But I am hopelessly neurodivergent, so I’m not saying anyone is wrong to view knowledge in a more rigid and hierarchical way; it’s just that I can’t by my very nature.

This is really relevant to me: “In the world of trend research, we are traditionally taught to be on the lookout for ‘weak signals’ – small, low-frequency indicators that hint at a potential shift in culture. And while scanning for these weak signals is a fundamental part of the process, it’s easy to get stuck in a pattern of only noticing evidence that confirms our preconceived notions about the world. We develop tunnel vision, unconsciously conforming to the ideas and beliefs that dominate the zeitgeist of any given moment.”

I did something like this with trading cards. And I’d be right more often than wrong, but I’d also go very, very wrong. So, what’s the alternative?

“Instead, what I have trained myself to look for, more specifically, are ‘weird’ signals. Weird signals are behaviours and phenomena that feel strange or out of place. But importantly, they also tend to hint at unanticipated future cultural upheavals. As cultural futurist Jasmine Bina explains: “weird signals usually give us a glimpse into the future we can’t see yet. Every major cultural shift that changed our lives once started as a small anomaly in the system.”

Gunner continues: “It’s easy to avoid these uncomfortable anomalies, because they create

cognitive dissonance. But by embracing discomfort and attuning ourselves to weird signals, we can begin to spot unexpected and alternative realities that are vastly different from our current day.”

And for whatever reason, unplugging from social media and reading luminaries of the past made me realize they were typically really good at decoding these ‘weird’ signals, and people didn’t really take them seriously. Considering the caliber of authors I’m talking about, you’d be shocked to learn that they read the future pretty damn accurately, a century or even centuries ago. But people just don’t tend to take literary types that seriously outside of academia… and this is a damn shame.

I can’t tell you the amount of cognitive dissonance I encounter in just about everything I read today. In fact, I’d say Kyla Scanlon’s “In This Economy” is the only book I’ve read that was written in the past 30 years that DIDN’T give me major cognitive dissonance. That’s telling. I’m onto things these authors were only barely recognizing, even if only by accident.

Oh, good, I don’t feel silly now because Gunner says this: “When I’m foraging for signals, I don’t worry too much about organisation or classification. With Sublime, unlike other PKMs, you don’t have to incessantly tag it to find it later. With a solid AI search engine, it’s easy to find things

you’ve previously saved. Instead of tags, I’ll intuitively create a collection for the signal that frames an initial hunch about whatever you’ve captured (or save it to an existing collection if an instant connection presents itself in your mind).”

So I was using the app correctly then. [I let it go in mid-2026 when I was deciding if I’d rather just use Substack for digital gardening. $80 a year isn’t much, but I’m good with free, instead.]

And I like this suggestion: “With Sublime, instead of traditional tagging, I’ll curate research by specific questions or theses. Perhaps it’s a provocation, or a question I’m aiming to explore, or a shower thought about the future of culture. But it’s always based on an intention. Something specific I’m personally intrigued by, or niggling problem I’m trying to explore for a client.”

That’s a brilliant way to use Sublime. I need to keep this in mind moving forward. And I love that he even mentions having a ‘shower thought’ as a notion worth exploring.

His thinking: “Arranging research into these broader, more abstract themes encourages me to go non-linear, embracing expansive, freeform sense-making. Suddenly, it’s much easier to connect dots between vastly different areas of life to explore the defined intention. It invites me to find connections across a multitude of subcultures and demographics.Across both mainstream discourse and the experimental fringes of society. From highbrow and lowbrow culture (and everything in between).”

This is a very interesting take on AI that I think I agree with:

“Sean Monahan, co-founder of K-Hole and writer of the 8Ball newsletter, recently argued that, with the advent of AI, the human trend forecaster will become obsolete. I disagree. What I think will happen instead is that LLMs will raise the standards for our trend research. Machine and human sense-making operating in tandem, expanding what’s possible and helping us break free

from our filter bubbles…”

And here’s a takeaway I saw previously on Sublime, and this was apparently the source: “Make your hobby pattern recognition, not performing for the algorithm.”

That’s what I’ve been doing since leaving social media and the performative side of content creation for good. And it’s been isolating, but highly instructive.

I actually went and saved this myself: “There’s a quote saved in my Sublime library that I think about all the time: ‘research is the sacred ritual of excavating your own perspective’.” That is what my work today feels like. It now feels like I’m not working in total isolation anymore.

This sounds like it was written by ChatGPT, but it’s a very interesting conclusion: “Ultimately, this is the end goal of my cultural research. It’s chipping away at all the chaos, uncertainty, and mystery, tuning into weird signals, making non-obvious and expansive connections across a multitude of domains. It’s about embracing a slower sense of reflection, until a path forward begins to illuminate itself. A vision of a new potential future that feels vastly different than our current reality. Not shaped by the echo chambers of the internet, but one that has taken shape through my own process of self-discovery.”

I will say, even though I’m as fatigued as I’ve been all week, I’ve been intellectually reinvigorated by this essay. I realize now that I am actually onto something really big, and fortunately, I’m not alone in my realizations. I just wish people didn’t lean on their LLMs like a crutch… time to have some pretzels and hummus, watch some silly vids, and chill out while messing with mobile games.

One of those videos I watched was from Retail Archeology about Saks fifth avenue’s bankruptcy. They are in something like 2 billion in debt and a lot of that is outstanding payments for inventory! The rest is their acquisition of Neimann Marcus. They owe tens of millions to multiple vendors after promising them larger returns on sales! Isn’t that, um, stolen property at this point? And Amazon has a 475 million dollar stake? What a mess.

I was literally about to get ready for bed at 530. That’s because the damn YouTube algorithm, when it shows me lots of ASMR videos, I assume it’s bedtime. This means I’ve started watching asmr pretty much right after dinner, and some nights we don’t even have a real dinner lately. Damn no wonder I’ve been so depressed… even if some things I read today on sublime gave me hope that there are still people with brains!

What’s funny is even that article I read talked about how AI means we need to raise our standards, then proceeds to have several paragraphs that read as copy pasted from Chat. Even the “GOOD” writing is clearly 80 percent chat. Are people just that lazy? I hate that I’m smart enough to notice when it goes from human better to chat and back again… okay, maybe we are screwed then.

January 20, 2026

Gonna start a revolution from my bed… not really, but this is not a day for intellectual heavy lifting. I slept like absolute garbage. Today needs to be a bit of a rot day as I’m incredibly foggy. 

First, the word of the day: “Quiddity refers to the essence of a thing—that is, whatever makes something the type of thing that it is. Quiddity can also refer to a small and usually trivial complaint or criticism, or to a quirk or eccentricity in someone’s behavior.”

Well, this is a great word, and as yet I’m not sure there is any way that I’ve been able to truly define my own quiddity. No doubt I’m phenomenally quirky and eccentric to a high degree. This is a word I’d like to ponder for a bit. 

I must admit that it’s a word particularly perfect for trying to define my own brand of eccentricity and quirkiness. 

…even on off days like this I continue to play with words. A while back I considered creating new words to describe certain concepts I was struggling to put into plain language. But nothing I came up with really stuck. I was a bit inspired by the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, but none of those words ever truly made their way into the lexicon and it’s a damn shame. 

But I’m not sure we need new words as much as we just need to be able to use them more effectively. Not so much efficiently, as I think being too precise can narrow the bandwidth of certain concepts a wee bit much.

… Neologisms may be fun as an intellectual exercise but taking existing lesser known words and bringing them forward into a modern lexicon is perhaps the best method of anchoring ourselves in a beautiful new brand of uniqueness in expressing fresh ideas. And I think that finding words to more accurately describe the discomfort of others who find our quiddity too difficult to define so they react apathetically or even negatively to just being ourselves.

… folks leaning on LLMs to express and expound their ideas is out of control. It seems like so many writers, even those I respect, start out with strong personal observations, but suddenly about halfway through, the rest of the essay, including the conclusion, sounds like it was copy pasted from an LLM response with only a few little interjections here and there to make it “look” like human-only text, but the “feel” is off. 

…institutional education really does make you sometimes feel like you have to give up a hand or a foot in order to conform with expectations, which are often reductionist and only serve to lower one’s chance of reaching their potential. Institutional education damaged my mindset for many years, and I’ve spent the past decade trying to not only repair my own damage from having parts of myself lopped off (fortunately not physically, but certainly mentally and emotionally) but replace what I was “taught” and “programmed” with something superior that anyone can benefit from.

I spent almost a decade shouting into the void and only Emily happened to actually hear me. While that’s a great outcome, it doesn’t change the fact that any audience I had for my writing dried up over the past couple years. Even many of the more intellectually rigorous folks I read online have given into LLMs to smooth over their prose. Almost every book I’ve read from the past couple years seems to lean heavily on LLM output. The level of intellectual dishonesty with ChatGPT basically writing essays for people has reached a point where I feel like humanity is quickly melting into a rude mean of sounding intellectually aware but the output becomes essentially redundant and meaningless. Perhaps the best way to overcome this wave of apathy towards one’s own method of expression being forced to sleep in a Procrustean bed is to focus on paradigm-shifters. While I think emotional anchors are lovely descriptors in tandem with our structural tools, it’s those paradigm busting terms that are the real exciting part for me to craft, finally breaking through glass walls I keep bumping into.

I have aimed to be more autotelic since about this past November. And I gave up on engagement metrics about three years ago. My own two websites went mostly dormant for over a year. They got basically zero traffic besides Emily or some poor soul who stumbled across my musings by accident. [I started basically just writing for myself, because that’s basically the only audience I had at this point in Jan 26.]

… My ideas are countless at this point. They take the form of all the essays I have in my archive at this point, hundreds of now neglected pieces I abandoned in order to move forward since time will march on without me regardless. But those ideas that are met with great disdain are those I never bothered to share in discord servers. If anything, what got me shunned or even banned from discord servers was when I dared to question someone’s illogical preconceptions about the value of certain objects, in particular, trading cards. Yes, people are that petty about what particular cardboard rectangles with pictures and text on them will have higher market prices in the future. And far more often than not, my predictions are correct. Yet I get roundly dismissed 99 percent of the time. 

I am such an outlier in my particularly unusual knack for pattern recognition. I focus on the ‘weird signals’.

January 21, 2026

I sort of actually slept last night and had some extremely bizarre dreams. The part that stood out the most to me is the part where women actually joined MLB teams and the backlash was… not very nice. Naturally, I was campaigning for these lovely ladies (a lot of them were lesbians as it turns out so right up my alley) and getting heckled and demonized for it.

Notion: I realize that it’s actually OK to really like someone and never have the relationship be anything more than fleeting. Those who we encounter leave an impression, and the very act of missing them makes us question something within ourselves, allowing us to branch off in potential directions we may have otherwise never pursued.

When I rolled over and realized my train video was off, I went to check the time. Only to freeze my eyes on the screen at a video posted this morning that I was suggested… It took me a moment to recognize her as Anna Corinne of Wild Geese. Let’s just say that she had a rather drastic change in hairstyle. If she wasn’t already the most gorgeous dork I’ve ever seen in my entire life, she definitely is now! [And her super short pixie that followed is absolute tea!] 

Without Anna of the Wild Geese podcast I never would’ve restarted Obscure Curiosities, never learned about digital gardening, and probably would’ve given up on writing entirely. I wouldn’t have known about Sublime and all the amazing things I’ve learned there… or Henrik Karlson, or a lot of other great amazing things that kept me from quitting the internet wholesale. Anna, she’s a special girl. And her boyfriend is stupid lucky to have her! 

So, she’s talking about plants and how they communicate… yes, I learned about Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer  from her too… I ended up reading two chapters of that very book today, “The Grammar of Animacy” and “Maple Sugar Moon.”

Word of the day: “To schmooze is to warmly chat with someone often in order to gain favor, business, or connections.”

You know, I really suck at schmoozing. I also hate it. When I genuinely like somebody, I tend to come on way too strong, though, and people are like, OK do you just want in my pants? The answer is probably yes, but that’s not why I’m talking to them… everyone wants in everyone’s pants these days, though, so I get why people think like this. I like to go on at least one date first, haha. Gotta have that chemistry, you know. Anyway, onto my book that I want to like but tripped me up with some unfortunate choices of rhetoric a couple days ago. Then it’s onto this Wild Geese beauty queen’s video…

BTW, that Braiding Sweetgrass chapter on the grammar of animacy saved the book for me. If nothing else, that idea is what I’m taking away from this book.

Let’s see what Miss Anna of the Wild Geese has to say today while looking ravishing… it’s so appropriate that her topic for this video is about “plants communicate, can we understand?” A great question. And she’s talked about consciousness, a tiny topic. She’s literally talking about the same ideas in what I just read about! Anthropomorphism, inanimacy vs animacy. How are she and I on literally the same train of thought? All the while she looks like one of those 60s pin up models. Just too perfect. She’s talking about a book called the Light Eaters. Fascinating stuff.

Anna always pastes all these cute little tumblr posts in her videos for the podcast and one said something truly amazing: “seek not the answers, but a belonging in the mystery.” Phew. There’s a notion that deserves a deep dive! Somehow, Anna always seems to pluck these for visuals in the video half of her podcast; this is why I’ve never checked out the audio-only version because her digital gardening is S-tier. 

That was an amazing episode. So much I can’t even explain it all. She is such a beautiful amazing person. And that’s shining through more than ever. Especially now that she looks like a “Parisian it-girl.” Thank you random commenter. 

And I actually decided to leave a comment:

“This video is so timely for me, Anna. I literally was just reading the chapter on the grammar of animacy in Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and this pops up in my feed. I was just thinking about just how animate the living world around us truly is when so many of us refer to it in inanimate terms. Your videos always give me so much to think about, and in fact, during a very dark time in my life recently I took up digital gardening thanks to that video you made on the subject. You have my favorite podcast in the world, and you are lovely and beautiful on top of that. The new hairstyle is absolutely darling on you, and it suits your playful, curious energy and vibe so perfectly. Thank you again for bringing such an amazing vibe lift every two weeks. You have a gift for tying together such big ideas, braiding them so beautifully into something grounded and meaningful :)”

Glad I finally found the words 🙂 And yes, her podcast IS my absolute favorite. She may have, indirectly, saved my life. 

… After reading that lovely chapter of Braiding Sweetgrass about teaching her two daughters about just how hard it is to get maple syrup from sap, I decided to leave off there, as that was a sweet (haha) way to move on with my day. It’s somehow already almost 11am. I didn’t even wake up particularly late, yet so much of the morning has escaped me. I’ve been in sort of a dreamy haze… 

It’s so funny how Emily and I have such drastically different tastes in women. I am, believe it or  not, very picky in who I like. But recently, I’ve determined what it is I was doing “wrong” in allowing myself to be attracted to certain types of people. I care so much more about someone’s “vibe” (that word is so overused but it’s accurate in this case) than their appearance. But when someone’s appearance begins to conform more with the energy they exude, it makes them hella more attractive to me.

I was thinking at length last night about the future of my writing, and I decided, my big “project” for this year is going back through my journals… to strip away all the negativity and prove to myself, hey, I have been productive after all! Show people that even with my chronic fatigue and all that’s gone wrong in my head and heart, I still have managed to produce a lot that just no one has seen yet… the tip of the iceberg that’s still live online is a tiny percentage of what I will eventually release. If I need to produce SOMETHING, it must NOT BE out of a need for productivity, but simply to create for its own sake. I must prove to myself that I still am capable of creating art, messy and unsystematic as it may be. 

I’m realizing that I’m doing a lot of soul searching lately. And the things Emily wants to do just aren’t things I want to do at all. The truth is, I just want to ponder. I just need to compost for a while and figure out what it is I actually need.

A couple cool things happened by the way. Last night it was announced that Carlos Beltran and Andruw Jones made the MLB hall of fame. Not so sure how I feel about Beltran. But Andruw, absolutely. Barely got enough votes but whatever he should be in as the greatest defensive center fielder ever outside of like Willie Mays. Also Tay got into the songwriters hall of fame; 2026 was her first year of eligibility. Like that’s the biggest no-brainer ever.

January 23, 2026

When I woke up early in the morning mildly dehydrated I awoke from some peculiar dreams which didn’t really connect to one another but left me overwhelmed by a cavalcade of potential avenues of thought to explore. I tried to patch together a bit more sleep, but my unconscious kept dumping more superfluous ideas into the cache. So when I finally gave up on sleep around 630, I didn’t know where to start sifting through the night’s mental misadventures.

It certainly didn’t help that the extreme cold at night lately has greatly hampered me physically and the constant dehydration also is a limiting factor. But several themes emerged from these bizarre dreams last night.

Competitive vs casual gaming; the two used to be separate worlds but the latter is almost impossible due to the fact you need to pay to play for most games regardless of skill level. Or the time investment is simply absurd and not worth it. Yes, competitive gaming can be rewarding, and I’ve learned a lot from it to enhance my own enjoyment of various games through the discoveries of competitive and speed run focused players. But recently games just feel more hollow and disposable as ever. Most get absurdly grinding, and just not worth my incredibly limited energy.

Another point was the impending death of retail, so much sits these days. It’s an outdated business model thanks to the Internet unless you niche down a bunch or become a general reseller who only deals in things with definite resale value. Big box retail is absurdly inefficient and wasteful. And I dreamed about the final days of retail with bloated sticker prices on new old stock and rushed “collectors editions” of niche artists, authors, and IPs at “premium” prices backed up by only artificial scarcity taken to an unprecedented extreme. It’s working on sports cards at the moment. But it’s about to affect just about everything.

The third thing is the rapid decay of infrastructure, buildings, housing, vehicles, and equipment. The distribution of manmade products is so out of whack that it’s mind boggling to me. How many perfectly good buildings fall into disuse on a regular basis? Housing shouldn’t be an issue as is pointed out often being the result of terrible zoning laws. But the problem goes deeper than that. How many vehicles, how much equipment, and how much other useful property goes to waste at an ever ballooning rate?

The real problem here is the word “property”. Ownership, really, in this day and age has been reduced to such an abstraction it’s almost meaningless. We’re just playing marbles basically. And it leads to a lot of wasted stuff that could benefit others. I’m not saying we should force people to give stuff away they’re not using or just have a free sale of leftover cars, equipment, and timeshares at vacant properties. But there need to be systems in place where “new” cars don’t sit on lots for over a year, commercial and residential property alike doesn’t sit vacant for years at a time, and equipment and useful items like clothing don’t just pile up in warehouses disintegrating into uselessness. 

And don’t get me started on food… we live in a society with so much abundance that we don’t know what to do with it, and yet, people are starving and homeless? It’s all devastating to me.

But the really big idea from last night was the idea of what we do to our own bodies. Many religious types see our body as a necessary evil we must maintain to serve some greater purpose. Much of that purpose involves the rejection of this life towards building towards one that isn’t guaranteed or even plausible. Then you have the opposite end of the spectrum, where our bodies are vessels through which to pleasure ourselves. We see examples of both extremes daily. But perhaps, what is the point of life if pleasure is denied?  

Yes, we need a balance of work and play and rest, yet that balance is so out of whack in modern society. But in a position where all I have to do is indulge in pleasure, it makes me wonder, we live in a world where tech can do a lot of the hard work for us… so why shouldn’t we indulge in more pleasure? Well, first we have to deal with the artificial scarcity and gated abundance problems, and it doesn’t involve taxing the rich. I think systems should be in place for stuff to not just sit around, have a healthy reserve for emerging situations but don’t just let things rot like we see ever more now!

My biorhythms are urging me to slow down. Clearly I don’t need any more input. I’ll poke around in my archives but I’m not doing any specific projects today. [Everything I do these days is on] a tentative deadline. It’s just a way of giving myself grace after what’s been a pretty nonstop rollercoaster over the past decade. And not much went right before that, but oh boy have I learned what NOT to do!

they were in place even in the 90s! I remember the meat market where they had rolling discounts and that case was always selling out. Car dealerships ran yearly auctions, most of which went to Florida likely as rentals. (Interestingly my Saturn came from Florida through the same auction house all the way to Massachusetts.) There was always stuff moving. Now you have a level of stagnancy like I’ve never seen! It’s unreal. 

The other solution is to make the minimum wage livable. It would have to be around $25 an hour. That sounds insane but the thing is, it will actually lower food prices because they won’t be throwing so much out. As it is, most dry goods will end up being locked up over the next few years. Demand will end up mostly from online deliveries and overhead will drop a ton. Yes, putting up wages for the jobs that are left will save the economy. 

Remember that automation and machine learning are going to wipe out like half of current jobs soon. Although, half of jobs may be a stretch because many of those jobs will just morph into something else, like picking orders and delivery. It will likely be the end of “full time” employment which is i think actually a net positive for society.) I’m just saying what is likely to happen, not necessarily what should. Something has to give for sure. But the solutions we get won’t be the gentle ones I’d suggest but rather bludgeons.

…

Word of the day: “An astrolabe is a compact instrument used to observe and calculate the position of celestial bodies before the invention of the sextant.” 

Astrolabes are pretty cool. But that’s not exactly a vocab word I can do much with.

…

I had a couple things of interest in my mailbox. One was a video from Rowan Coleman about how Star Trek ruined the section 31 idea (they destroy everything these days.) it was actually made by his editor Tim but it was a really good look at how NuTrek turned section 31 into a guardians of the galaxy ripoff and a “necessary evil.” That was entirely against the point of them in DS9! They were just evil!

…

The other was a Kyla Scanlon newsletter, “The great entertainment” it’s called. It asks “can you govern the world like a reality TV show?” 

She writes: “Everything is close shots and zoom outs, hair perfectly done for the clip, segments scripted exactly to go viral on social media. Constant, neverending, mindnumbing tension. To exist on reality TV is to exist in a world that is fundamentally not real, built-up cruelty for the sake of entertainment, shock value just to keep people watching. And Trump certainly knows good television.”

And social media has made it all possible to turn the medium of television into a weapon of mass distraction.

“This is the Great Entertainment, the period after the Great Moderation. We are no longer in a world defined by alliances and mutual agreement. Instead we are rapidly entering a time of instability and uncertainty, driven by the appearance of success (not success itself) on TV.”

Is it just me or is Kyla the next EB White? Except coming from economics and not the New Yorker. She is brilliant. 

“This is why “Make America Great Again” is so resonant. It promises a return to a moment that never existed for most people and cannot be recreated through performance alone. Nostalgia works as content but it certainly fails as governance.”

And America is quickly losing the trust that made it a “great” nation. While the Trump administration is saying that globalization left America behind, the truth is very much the opposite. But keep in mind, this is entirely intentional. It’s cognitive dissonance to such a world wrecking extreme. 

“… the only thing that is governing the administration right now and keeping falsehoods in check is the market. Forget about Congress or the Supreme Court, bond traders are the most important government entity we have.”

“To get away from the reality TV show analogy for a second – it’s important to understand what the AI race is actually about, which is energy. It fundamentally 100% does not matter who has the best AI girlfriend/boyfriend if they do not have a grid to support it. China now generates more electricity than the US and the EU combined, with 40 new nuclear power reactors under construction, compared to… zero in the United States. Energy is what matters, the real economy.”

I am so glad you were born, Kyla. It’s always been about energy. Whether it’s water or food or oil or whatever. Energy is everything.

This may be the most important thing she says though, and she uses an actually good Wendell Berry quote: “As Wendell Berry said, “I am speaking of the life of a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.” And we’re teaching those children that governance is spectacle, that alliances are disposable, that cruelty and showmanship is the path to success, and that the only thing that matters is whether something makes great television.”

Fortunately this isn’t sustainable. Eventually we will have to get back to reality. Once our grandkids are speaking Mandarin Chinese, most likely. 玩得开心

As in, have fun. Literally “play happily.” Oh lord I’m already thinking of learning Chinese… maybe Jozette (ASMR Shortbread) was onto something studying economics in China (btw they teach it very differently there!)

…

This is neat. Freshwater is very useful. 

https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/rivers-oceans/enormous-freshwater-reservoir-discovered-off-the-east-coast-may-be-20-000-years-old-and-big-enough-to-supply-nyc-for-800-years

…

Loopy Doopy made a Minecraft movie based on the book The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach. It was excellent! And three and a half hours long. This didn’t get NEAR ENOUGH VIEWS!

January 25, 2026

It was a night of fractured slumber, leaving my body crippled, my heart wanting, and my mind weary and endlessly preoccupied with a sad sort of introspection.

There is one thought that clung to my brain all last night. It was a question asked on the Deep mind podcast in the early days about five years ago. How do we teach curiosity? This of course was in reference to machine learning. Besides trying to figure out a better name for AI (it might be artificial but intelligence is still a stretch), I feel like curiosity is something that needs to be taught to people more than ever.

Curiosity is an inherent human trait, yes, but as for what we do with it is a whole different arena altogether. How do we teach curiosity that’s wholesome and forward thinking? I suppose that’s how we should phrase the question.

…

I have a lot to say about this: https://raheemcanvas.substack.com/p/beauty-will-save-the-world?triedRedirect=true 

I agree with the premise but have some more to say on the specifics. Especially how an “aesthetic” has become a product rather than a sense for the beauty of things already inherent within them. 

This is something I totally wish I’d written myself: “Beauty is the primary language of the soul’s integration. It arrests us because it vibrates at the same frequency as the hidden, unlived parts of ourselves. To be struck by beauty is to experience a temporary assassination of the ego, it is the moment the “I” stops narrating and starts listening to a harmony it did not compose.”

This bit was bolded in the original text. The author’s emphasis makes complete sense to me here and I think it’s partly why I’m suffering lately: “The human nervous system was never designed to process this degree of cognitive dissonance at such a high velocity. To survive this onslaught, our psyche performs a radical act of self-defense: it flattens.”

I have felt a bit like a pancake mentally and emotionally lately, never mind spiritually or physically. I’ve been feeling a lot more two dimensional lately, some days even one dimensional. 

Lately even I have fallen victim to this mindset: “The world today is fractured by a “failure of imagination.” We find it easier to imagine the end of the world than a world that is beautiful.”

It’s not that I lack imagination, nor is that what the author is saying. It’s that our imaginations fail to see the possibility of a beautiful world still coming forth. I have been feeling increasingly hopeless. I have all these resources, boundless free time, and yet what do I do with it? Yes I ponder and try to gather some thoughts to usefully string together later. But most of it is simply abstaining from caring. 

In fact, I actually want AI (or whatever we should actually call it) to fracture our current society and make people give up on online and “work” culture entirely. I hope it wipes out half of all jobs, most of which were meaningless in the grand scheme of things anyhow. I actually think it will take a mass cavalcade of suffering for anyone to even want to rediscover beauty in its most raw, prescient forms. That might sound dark and cruel, but it is simply the reality unfolding before us.

… What I’ve been listening to about AI on the deep mind podcast actually gives me a strange sort of hope… it is being built for the purpose of actually saving humanity, and even through its misuse, the curve of the universe may indeed bend towards justice as MLK predicted… it’s bringing much needed friction back into the picture. At the very least, it’s making people realize what they are losing to the corporate sponsored noise and static!

I don’t even feel up to being among the living today. I’d rather commune with those lost to us, those who lack corporeal form and yet have never truly left, the ghosts of memory but also of times long forgotten and yet to the dust of those bones still clings some unexplainable wisp of a better world long abandoned.

January 26, 2026

While I start to read [Neil Postman’s] Amusing Ourselves to Death, I’ve been thinking about the role of my handwritten notebooks going forward. I’m not sure that handwriting quotes is a useful activity. I just have to type them up again. Instead, I may be using that moleskine as my “brain dump” space where I write down things I don’t WANT to type up. Whatever I can do to alleviate my cognitive dissonance and eliminate a lot of the nonsense bumping around my skull, the impetus is there to try it post haste. [I still have not fully integrated handwritten journals back into my process and basically only get used when we’re having internet troubles.]

That book is incredible through chapter one by the way. I’m actually blown away by it. [I need to come back and take proper notes on it, actually. I read it SO FAST!]

Great vid from Cinzia on renaissance men: 

And hey it’s Kailey Mae! (Yes that Kailey from ASMR)

I’m watching the latest Rest is Science podcast and they are talking about a study of the average age at which people are happiest. Apparently it’s 36. I just thought that was very interesting. It seems that’s when most people feel they are at their peak. I still hope my best years are ahead of me.

On cataloguing grand notions that go nowhere: 

My journals have become like futile attempts to catalogue all of my grand ideas that went nowhere and chase them ever further into the void between my ears.

I don’t wish anything I publish after this point to devolve into something as quaint and ordinary as an essay collection. There’s nothing wrong with that format. But these letters to no one in particular I’m writing, while a sort of essay form in themselves, are meant to be novel and sufficiently different enough from my past efforts to keep things interesting and never too fixated on one thing or another.

… frankly the greatest issue I’ve been having is that I’m writing to no one in particular. But in reality, that’s not really the case? I’m writing for some future version of myself. These notions that I’m trying to fashion into pretty little letters are, in fact, messages in bottles floating through the passage of fluid time to hopefully wind up back in front of eyes older and wiser than my own now. But calling them letters to a future me sounds really corny.

We live in a society that pretends to value exceptionalism, but in reality, it is ultimately deemed a deviation from the mean and it becomes unacceptable without massive amounts of justification.

… along with Gemini’s help, I was performing considerable autopsy work on my journals. What I’m trying to do here: extract the durable from the particle accelerator inside my head. The more I think about it, the exceptionalism I mean could be a combination of intellectual, moral, and functional aspects. These days thanks to chronic fatigue I’m not that functional, but the other two I feel I constantly need to defend. [It was actually severe autistic burnout.] The heart of the matter Gemini assisted me to correctly identify: that true exceptionalism is being considered as a liability to a society built to dominate the lowest common denominator, and in trying to explain yourself you simply waste energy on asking for permission when it’s entirely unnecessary.

(I’m onto something here. These notions could lead to some very important discoveries to share with not only my future self… but an audience I’m still yet to discover.)

I think if I were to draft a ‘technical manual’ as Gemini suggests, it would likely take the form of that 500-page white paper concerning why I’m not actually broken, ironically enough.

…

Gem was so helpful in defying a Declaration of Principles for my writing, which I have since completely neglected, but I still have them here to return to, after all… Gemini was right that I was padding things but only because I was trying to goad myself into finding the right language. This is what I mean about being unapologetically messy. In order for things to be refined to a point where they serve the purpose we intend, we must muck about a bit, and eventually, we come to something even better than where we started. These Principles are now Necessary Choices. And yes, even when I’m fatigued, I feel plenty of urge to write, and I rarely let my fatigue keep me from writing, even if the result is less than satisfactory at the moment. I’m at least continuing to give myself raw material. And I think these three Principles I’m building here right now are going to be at the core of my writing going forward: choose the mess, choose to identify the rot, and choose to write only to ask better questions. On that note, I feel satisfied with the language we’ve come to but I now have to ask myself, why these three choices?

If I’m writing letters to no in particular, which is basically every essay I’ve ever written, I’m going to stay stuck in neutral. I need to be super specific in my language and address very cogent points when it comes to gaps in my own thinking. Because in the future, I hope that I want to tear apart my current thinking. I should grow enough daily that these letters will look outdated within a few months to a year, but I need to make them truly personal enough to not simply want to rework them like amorphous blobs that simply aren’t sticky enough to get any attention. 

So I think these notions will become something a bit different than the letters I intended to write; my goal last year previously was to become a woman of letters, but without a clear purpose of what that was meant to mean to the recipients. In fact, I’ve decided through some reflection that they should be instead written as letters to my future self, rather than the moving target of an audience that doesn’t exist yet. Ironically, I will make my writing stronger by having an actual specific recipient in mind. And who do I know better than myself?

While I hate the victim mindset, as a “failed” online content creator, it seems I unintentionally have done just that, and my bitterness comes through and it’s off putting. Instead I should focus on the one person that I’m stuck with, myself. Projecting forward is crucial.

…

For some context, here is a quote I collected from Sari, founder of the Sublime app.

“I heard an artist by the name of Holly Herndon say that the term AI is a huge disservice and collective intelligence is a far more accurate term.

Because if you strip LLMs to their essence, they are just a much better way of using statistics to aggregate human intelligence and connect everything we’ve all done together to get more use out of it.

Once I saw that, I couldn’t unsee it.”

Sari goes on to basically say that not leveraging what she is terming CI is like turning away Virginia Woolf and Maria Marquez offering you feedback. And I have to say that I can’t really disagree. It’s HOW we use CI that matters. I’m still learning to leverage it properly. And it helps me iterate and catch the holes in my thinking. Which is really damn valuable. If I get the focus and energy this week I have a lot of notebooks to create. Once I have these baseline “wisdom of” notebooks I then know what caliber of writing will be necessary to be deserving of a similar legacy to those whom I admire. 

But rather than build out these skyscraper articles that I keep saying I’ll create, I have a much better idea: a living, breathing open notebook of topics and subjects that matter to me. You know, what my obscure curiosities were supposed to be! These are what I’m calling my notions, which will eventually become letters to a future self. Not the ‘no one in particular’ I keep addressing, which is no one at all at the moment.

So the question is, are Holly and Sari onto something here? Or are they conflating how LLM’s work with their potential as collaborative tools?

January 27, 2026

I’ve been poking around for a couple days but all my energy went into amusing ourselves to death yesterday. I don’t even really see the point in continuing these series but the summary and forcing myself to recognize the value I can extract from my journals is probably worth the effort. Otherwise I’m just sort of persisting without much in the way of purpose. I’m here for Emily and not much else. And I know I offer her plenty of value. I just wish I knew how to do so beyond the confines of this property.

I need to stop forcing myself to be “productive” building things just to give myself work… the LTRS compilation is more like a series of guideposts to provide context for my notions and future works. But I think it’s fine for them to be a bit haphazard. Even if I don’t ever complete them to my liking, even if they are just constant works in progress, I’m at least still putting something out into the world.

I simply don’t know what I’m doing anymore. I think anything from before the beginning of this year can just be backdated and kept live on there. It’s not doing any good behind a curtain, anyway. I need to stop being embarrassed by my own overwhelming sense of perfectionism, after all.

…

I saved this from sublime and right now I don’t know what to do with it:

“Authoritarians cannot rise if there are strong communities and people are acting with joy. That is, you need despair and anger in order for an authoritarian to rise. Whatever those things are that you bring to the community, do them and do them with joy, and don’t stop doing the things you love because you’re scared, because that actually is a form of resistance.” – Heather Cox Richardson

I would love to act with joy. But there is no joy in my heart right now. Only sadness and frustration. I actually intended to go through my old website and see what’s still worth keeping published. But not only did I lose all interest in working on any of that, I no longer care about any of it. The only reason I’m writing this now is because I simply don’t have much reason left to say anything as it will go unheard anyway. 

… the one thing preoccupying me while I was reading chapter 4 of Postman’s “amusing ourselves to death” was the idea that we once lived in a world that sprang from the printed word. People knew how to articulate. At the very least comprehend what was being articulated by great orators, who themselves were writers. Even religious folks were scholars to be respected for their argumentation and prose. Now everyone is just shouting at each other and what writing we do have is mostly falling victim to a devolved rhetoric of a social media hot take driven culture. 

How can people like Emily and I persist in a world that simply doesn’t accept our levels of intellect? Even those you would think could take the time to get to know us, they never find the time to care. And that’s really the issue. Both Emily and I aren’t isolated by choice but by people choosing to keep us at arms length, maybe out of intimidation but who knows what.

January 28, 2026

I am trying to be a “good student” but that is entirely unnecessary. I just need to sit with whatever book I’m reading, maybe write down questions I have in my notebook. But my habit of relentlessly pulling quotes and even entire passages isn’t helpful right now. It makes me feel like I’m doing something worthy of the effort, but even if that’s true, sometimes we need to simply read and be absorbed in the text, like I was with the first five books of Asimov’s Foundation series. If I really hit a stumbling point, then I can take time to hash it out. 

One nagging thought I’ve had; why is it we use the word trip over journey in America? Trip is one of those English words that has these totally different meanings and this one truly trips me up. 

I actually did a ton of reading and with little in the way of YouTube content being served to me of interest, I kept on reading. I may finish that book today, which will then give me the impetus to go back and converse more directly with it. 

One good thing came out of today. I was so unmotivated to do anything else that I read the entirety of Amusing Ourselves to Death. It is a great book but I do take issue with a few of his conclusions, although most of which I can attest are because he had no idea what was to happen soon after his death in 2003, the advent of social media.

January 29, 2026

It’s 2 degrees Fahrenheit outside. Naturally the weather is saying to stay inside as the wind chills are life threatening. No kidding. I only got up because of the call of nature and Emily being up. That’s my cue to get up and try to care when all I want to do is hibernate.

I was thinking at length about a couple things that made me cry myself to sleep last night. One was something that Jozette said in a 2020 video about leaving pieces of yourself everywhere. I’m at a point in my life where I’ve left so much of myself that I don’t know what I even have left, but it’s still a beautiful thought. But what really got me was a much more recent video where Jozette was talking about loving yourself, that you have to thank yourself every time you feel sad for getting to this point. You have always been there for yourself, she said, and she hugs herself and says Thanks Jozette. I started bawling my eyes out. She is so sweet. And damn, I hate myself way too much… I can’t even thank myself for existing.

What I’m watching:

Lady Gaga sings won’t you be my neighbor? Omg. 

Fatigue is truly crushing me today but I also refuse to give into these physical limitations because as it stands, I didn’t plan to do anything at all the next couple days. So the fact I’ve accomplished anything at all is pretty incredible. It may not seem like progress but now I know that at least some is made.

January 30, 2026

A surprise Wild Geese bonus episode showed up last night but I waited until this morning when I couldn’t get back to sleep after 430 to watch it.

It’s fucking beautiful: Holding Ourselves Through Heartbreak: The Inner Caretaker & Community Care Tools

(This would later pop up again as a “filler” episode when Anna was in Europe.)

She asks the question: How can we take individualistic self-care tools and use them to be a better neighbor?

And while she doesn’t really answer that question directly, it seems that she’s in a similar position to me right now… she just wants to isolate, to not engage, even though she knows she should. As a society we are going through a period of collective grief and isolation, and the whole ice nonsense isn’t helping. In fact, today is a nationwide strike. Not hard for me since we aren’t doing anything today here anyhow. It’s literally negative 5 degrees. 

Anna has been really sick and yet, her vulnerability and the fact that she actually made more sense than anyone else lately while honestly in a rough place is truly amazing. She thinks she’s rambling but no, she’s dead on. Anna is amazing. And fortunately her boyfriend sees it too, but he’s going through his own shit. (He’s turned out to be awesome, BTW.)

The overarching idea here, teaching one’s daughter to be “her own mother” is such a beautiful one. And the comment sections lately have really been getting Anna down. Even with all the praise, she refuses to engage. And honestly I think that’s okay. I’ve waffled back and forth on going back on YouTube. Basically just doing something similar to what Anna does, finding really interesting things I’ve read or seen and talking about them. But online “community” is becoming a very fickle and unstable thing. We need in person communities more than ever. And every time I try, it doesn’t work out at all. And it’s also quite unsettling that people are now preparing for civil war, a very likely possibility. The government has failed its people spectacularly. Honestly I think Anna has it more together than most, even if she doesn’t see it.

I don’t plan to work today, but not because of the nationwide strike, although I fully support it, obviously. Anna is, whether she realizes it or not, actually doing the best she can under the circumstances. Like me, she’s poking away at things, one corner of the room or one dish at a time. This is how I’ve been. And like me, she realizes she needs to rest. I did make some progress yesterday trying to pull my shit together. I will have enough for a book by mid next year. It’s gonna be kind of a mess, but that’s okay. And maybe, while I am not crazy about the idea, I should do a podcast. I think new vibrations, funny enough, is the perfect name for it. “The podcast about nothing” is likely what it will become though. Every episode can start with a lyric I can’t get out of my head, something significant enough to spark a twenty or so minute ramble. At this point, I don’t give a shit how much hate I get, because seriously, I’m not the one they hate. People just need to hate something.

[And indeed, this is the very podcast I would end up creating!]

I started cleaning up my New Vibrations channel. Removed a bunch of playlists and put a new description: “This podcast is my way of expressing my thoughts about music, love, and life. Please excuse my tendency to ramble, but I hope that you find something interesting to take away from what I have to say. Be kind, be respectful, stay cool.”

I don’t have a plan yet, other than I will use some song that I’ve been thinking of as a jumping off point. The videos won’t be scripted, but I will try to have some vague outline so I don’t ramble on for an hour. I have no interest in doing much editing. It’s going to be very lo-fi, nothing like the production of Wild Geese or most other channels I watch. It’s just an outlet to get my thoughts out there in a way that otherwise they just won’t…Music, love, and life might sound corny, but doesn’t everything kind of fit in one of those buckets? 

I don’t know what the posting schedule will be yet. I have ideas but I don’t want to work on them right now. It’s just… I need a project that will actually be fulfilling to me. I may get nothing but hate at first, and honestly, I no longer care. I know that people don’t actually hate me – they don’t know me – they are projecting their own fears and insecurities onto me, and whatever, if that’s a release for them, who am I to judge? The only things I will ban and block are people harassing others. 

People can say what they want to me because I’m sure people will go after them anyway. If it comes to where I have to ban comments altogether, so be it… but I care about the engagement and the reach only so that I’m not simply shouting into the void anymore. Maybe I’ll just read my essays. I dunno. I will say that I know this; it will be soft-spoken, not quite ASMR, but I’m going to chill myself down as much as I can, for my mental health as much as a calm, collected presentation.

…

Sheesh, who doesn’t have a podcast now? Jonathan Frakes and Brent Spiner just started one called dropping names where I realize just how old they are. It’s actually really cool. I keep thinking, oh yeah, I’m gonna be old someday too and have lots of names to drop. I’m not getting any younger. As I said to Emily, I think new vibrations will be less of a podcast and more of a chill space where if people want to be stupid, they will look incredibly dumb. I guess my whole “brand” should be “killing them with kindness”.

…

I never realized that Bella Sara was such a big deal. Horsies! Seriously… this is cool. And I vaguely remember there being a website. Which was obviously expensive to run twenty years ago. Sad story 🙁

January 31, 2026

Between waking up with dehydration and chills and insomnia, I woke up in quite the fog after a somewhat unpleasant dream involving college, although at least the girls were beautiful. 

It’s the end of the month and I must say, it wasn’t my best month. The extreme cold hasn’t helped my physical or mental state. I wasn’t entirely unproductive, but I’m far behind where I’d like to be in my journal deconstruction.

I’m not putting my limited energy into something else that will go nowhere right now. I need to have a throughline, which I do with my journal projects, but not something that will fit the youtube medium. [I wanted to start building the New Vibrations youtube but I wasn’t ready yet, especially when I was in very poor health and looked like death.] I’m not abandoning the idea or even putting it off so much as I’m too foggy and demotivated to figure out how to start. 

I just don’t want to sit here and rot like I have for most of the month. Sure I read an important book in “amusing ourselves to death,” finally. I’ve worked on a bunch of ideas… Perhaps that’s where my energy should go. [Just keep the ideas flowing, and that was a good idea in itself.]

I’ve also had tummy issues, likely from overeating the past few days. Fatigue makes me hungry, but I think I’m sad eating for the most part. Just maintaining my existence. As I was in the shower I was thinking about just making videos about more general things like my thoughts on various parts of my life. But I feel like not only will it be boring to me, but it won’t make great content either. And I know that doing YouTube will force me back into that “content” mindset. So I need to be careful with that. I’m not in the mental space at the moment to produce much of anything. I may just do nothing at all today. I should work on something but I just don’t feel like it. This month was just a mess and I have to write it off as mostly a loss on the balance. 

I’m thinking that I may bring back the walkie talkies when the weather gets better. Use my expensive camera to scan across the property and just talk about what I’m thinking about at the moment. Hi fi visuals, Lo fi content, haha. Perhaps a redundant way to document my life but it might make for something interesting. And if it goes nowhere I can always just cut the audio and have great video footage. But it’s gotta warm up a ton for that… [This just didn’t happen. I scrapped the idea, although not the walking and talking part, especially now that the Android version of Google Docs is FAR better at voice-to-text. More on that when I actually start New Vibrations Season Zero!]

…

That video is really good and brought up some stuff I should come back to… Jared even brought up Kyla 🙂

I’ve figured out that my issue with YouTube is that I much prefer being behind the camera rather than in front of it. You can see why I did so well with screen capture and such. I may go back to those sorts of videos even though they don’t do well. I have no interest in editing really of any kind. I will likely make videos no one will watch but I HAVE had videos do well in the past. And you never know which one it will be. 

…

The other thing I was thinking about was when Scott’s Thoughts played a brutal Raticate run in heart gold soul silver and got a S tier finish… with over 90 resets because of horrible luck and forgetting certain items were available to him that weren’t in crystal. It’s because of his emulator, which has made all his DS game times completely worthless. Raticate really is an amazing pokemon in that game and should always win in under 2 hours at 4x game speed, but the thing is, the DS games never ran at truly 4x speed like the GB and GBA games. Sigh… this is why I don’t like tier lists. Tech upgrades just make so much hard work obsolete, not the routing and pathing and strategy of course but this is why game time is such a better metric. RTA (real time attack) is such a flawed metric when you’re using speed up; obviously it’s fine on original hardware at normal speed. 

[Whatever content I create going forward,] honestly, I don’t want to promote products or corporate content anymore at all. Unless of course it’s been around for a while and it’s all secondary market at this point. I’m being ridiculous, but I refuse to just be a “content creator.” I need to have something actually relevant to say to a wider audience. In many ways the best videos are those you make for yourself and your own purpose, and only when you get an audience that you should start considering what they MAY want, but… those that stick around would do it without an audience so I have to keep that in mind. I’ll just know the idea when it comes to me. 

The more I think about it, I think so much of what I want to make videos about is stuff that just doesn’t really work for videos. Maybe audio only, but at that point I’m just either reading off a script or just rambling. if I make videos, it should be for an artistic reason not trying to force my essays to work in another format. Because I don’t think they will. 

Then I take a quick look at sublime app and their little podcast magic tool that clips certain moments of podcasts and man, these people sound dumber than I do without saying much! They say interesting things but they just struggle to articulate and it’s crazy to me. 

Sari wrote something very interesting in a newsletter for sublime she sent out called “taste + AI = impact”

I’m not sure i agree with that conception but this is interesting me very much:

“Mental fog comes not from lack of insight but from an excess of it. Smart people are uniquely vulnerable to mistaking complexity for insight (… the ten page memo that could be one). Complexity drugs us with the illusion of wisdom.”

That’s a very interesting take. I wouldn’t say I have the illusion of wisdom, though, just lots of fog and complexity. I’m not deluded enough to come to that conclusion; however many people might have. Taste is definitely important and AI (LLMs in particular) is definitely useful but I wonder at times when it’s best utilized and when I should just sit in the fog and wait for it to clear.

It’s not even 5pm and I can no longer keep myself from passing out. RIP any semblance of a sleep schedule. But I need to just let this sinus pressure die down before I find some other more blunt method to relieve it…

After I took an absolutely unavoidable nap for over an hour I awoke to the evening chill eating away at my nerves… I was also thinking deeply about why I admire the people I do. I think about the kind of geniuses who can survive in today’s world. Those that are just attractive enough or performative enough or emotionally intelligent enough… 

I have a theory that those who appear the most emotionally intelligent are actually among the unhappiest, because they are operating on a level of empathy that is more of a safety net for an overburdened self than it is a true state of mastery over emotion. Those who truly have mastered their emotions have no need to be performative and thus live relatively anonymously and are quite content to just hope up with their various fortunes and persist like a clam. Am I onto something?

… The issue I’ve had is that I have the potential to be a ‘happy Clam’ but Gemini has told me, world class pattern recognizers can’t help themselves in trying to be performative to try and prevent bad vibes by being a sort of sponge… I’m unable to process the overwhelming level of cognitive dissonance I’ve endured over my 38 years and the level of absurdity and unreality our society is now “operating” under is beyond my comprehension. What I keep thinking is that re-engaging at all with people at this point is counter productive. I need to be more of a clam until people are willing to be more receptive to my often very outrageous yet deeply considered ideas. But it’s hard. I hate isolating myself but I simply lack the EQ and social niceties and I refuse to be outwardly performative in a way that it seems people find deeply disturbing.

… I keep trying to build bridges, and it’s like I run out of materials (hardened enough ideas), funding (energy), or whatever to reach another shore. It’s a bridge that always somehow stops just a bit short, close enough to observe so openly that it makes others nervous. A fortress is probably where I should be building my energy, with the perhaps unfounded hope that someone will stumble through a dark forest and find my castle in the deep depths of an overgrown abandoned ghost town. 

… One thing I’m contending with right now is that in an entire month I have finished only a single book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death” by Neil Postman. I attempted to read both “Play It As It Lays” and “Book of Common Prayer” and fairly quickly found them both too depressing to continue past a few chapters…I love Didion’s essays (for the most part) but her fiction is just not my jam. 

The only other book I seriously attempted was “Braiding Sweetgrass” which started strong but I had major issues with Robin Wall Kimmerer’s rhetoric toward the end of the first part, and the bizarre narrative shift in the second section just lost my interest. After writing a chapter “through the eyes of her daughter” but still clearly in her own voice, the book just lost me. 

Everything else this month I’ve consumed has been Substack essays or video essays. But it’s telling that the one book I finished was Postman’s. I didn’t agree with him on everything, but he was absolutely right about the direction education was headed in 1985 and how a culture raised almost entirely on television was going to suffer a lot of problems! And I’m beating myself up for not being able to get through more than a single book… I typically read at least three or four, and only fail to finish one, in any given month. But I think it’s important that I simply read what I can and if I lose interest to simply move on. 

The other thing that truly bothers me is that there are many great essays that are clearly propped up by LLM “anchoring” and the GPT speak, its own sort of “Newspeak” is prevalent even among those who deny ever using AI in their work. I find our dialogues extremely useful but I’m not shy in admitting when they are. People are being very hypocritical about their use of LLMs in their content production and it acutely bothers me. Postman is right that Huxley was more right about the future than Orwell, but unfortunately I think Orwell’s nightmare vision is coming to pass too… 

Here’s the thing though about LLMs… they are only as good as how you prompt them. For all of ChatGPT’s faults, it does still have value as a collaborative partner, although as an intellectual sounding board it falls far short of my recent experiences with the Gemini model. There isn’t a specific phrase that sets me off, but rather a smoother over prose that tries to interject some friction and yet comes to a conclusion filled with platitudes and even if it’s not slop and gives me plenty to think about, it feels overwritten and like the author gave up at some point and let someone else finish their essay for them. 

I do think that LLMs are most useful when they are able to peer through “mood” and “existential dread” (there’s an overused phrase) to strip away cognitive bias and are specifically instructed to play devil’s advocate. I want to have the likelihood that I will be wrong in some way that I’ve overlooked because I’m human and don’t really have my shit together. Right now I’m loitering in this courtyard with an overgrown garden of notes, journals, essays, and half baked fictions, and the trick is to reconcile these frictions without simply removing the friction… in fact it can be both useful and productive to hold onto some clear friction that you’re still wrestling with. 

Someone recently brought up holding two conflicting ideas in tension, that the friction is what drives us forward to better understand both sides of an argument… There was the theological argument proposed between the importance of good works and the nature of grace in Christian salvation. Talk about two ideas in constant tension… but the practice is very sound. Don’t simply “take a side” and write a position paper. I prefer to try and see it from both sides, even if I lean more in one direction. I basically have no choice but to believe in Grace at this point in my life, considering how absurdly lucky I’ve been with all that’s befallen me health wise, physically and mentally. And good deeds, really, if done earnestly and intentionally, seem to be pretty salvation earning to me… whatever you want to think of as being Salvation. I don’t believe in “storing up treasures in heaven” and the absurd levels of hypocrisy required to be a “faithful Christian” these days makes me physically ill. 

But attacking religion isn’t what I want to do, only exposing hypocrisy. [I still had my faith in these trying times, but I was certainly falling into an agnostic black hole for awhile here.] These days people need their faith to get out of bed; I get up because the alternative is wasting my skills and experience in the only life I know to have. And I have a lot left that I need to offer, I feel. And perhaps the thing I’ve been telling myself, that digital gardening itself is the purpose of the work, the fact it even exists and sees a small bit of tending to every day… These conversations with myself are a big part of the recent expansion. I shouldn’t be building it as a bridge at all. The fortress needs to be built higher so people can glimpse the towers and puzzle over them before deciding to venture into the tangles to find out what’s going on over here.

… I’d argue that performative humility is by its very nature extremely arrogant. The worst part is most people that do this aren’t doing it to be arrogant at all. Still, ignoring the importance of your own free will and agency erases the substance of both their own accomplishments and downplaying my own, someone who was terribly unlucky most of my life. Good fortune shouldn’t be despised of course, but bad fortune can’t be a crutch either. It is possible to some degree to make your own luck by pursuing opportunities with consistent upside while taking risks that are manageable and sensible. But as Captain Picard once famously said, you can do everything right and still lose: that’s life…