March 1, 2026
It’s a new month and this typically means a reflection on the past month. Well, the first two months of this year have been so cold and freezing that I’ve basically been stuck inside, and too much inside my own head. I’ve gotten a lot of writing done, explored a lot of subjects, and yet, only read two complete books. From an intellectual standpoint, I feel very behind, but there is something freeing about going at your “own pace” even when it’s glacial. Yes I have spent way too much time in Fortnite, to the degree I actually dream of tycoon style creator islands. But I suppose that’s an upgrade for my nightly misadventures, introducing some whimsy into the bizarre machinations of my unconscious mind.
The direction I want to go right now: What words have become so overused in the current vernacular as descriptors of a particular ideology, political alignment, or ideal that have been rebranded so many times that they have not only lost their original meanings, but in their overuse have essentially become meaningless and can mean whatever you want them to mean? To me, the labels of ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal,’ ‘Republican’ and ‘Democrat’ mean absolutely nothing besides the ‘red’ or ‘blue’ jersey you can imagine a political candidate (usually someone who is entirely self-interested and looking to use their political position to rub elbows with people who will make them filthy rich) wearing in a ridiculous game of tearing up the midfield while the fans murder each other in the stands. Yes, I’m being sarcastic, but you understand the degree to which American politics are, indeed, the greatest spectator sport gone horribly wrong.
The real consequences of politics can have far-reaching effects. I’m not saying that politics are ineffective, because clearly they are doing something, even if it’s not productive. The issue is that identifying as ‘Republican’ and ‘Democrat’ is simply what side of the aisle you’re standing on. And that ties into the idea that people use ‘freedom’ for, to pass legislation that makes your supporters be able to live with a bit less friction, with often disastrous consequences. I think we do need to have a lot more than a bilateral political binary because this is how the extremes have become so powerful in today’s world.
Yes, the machinery those labels control is very real. The labels are meaningless only to get people to take sides so that they can keep score, even if most people aren’t keeping track of the actual goals, which are happening in plain sight while most people are too busy fighting in the stands supporting their meaningless ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ flags. If you actually look at the definitions of conservative and liberal, you’ll find conservatives who push expensive social programs and liberals who want to return to 19th century agrarianism. It’s all about picking red or blue, and I choose purple.
As for ‘elitism’ what ‘elitism’ truly is involves those who live at the extreme opposite ends of the political spectrum in order to make their lives feel meaningful. People are taught they need an ‘enemy’ and unfortunately, one of those enemies has become trans folks, to both ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ people, people like me are an easy target to blame everyone else’s problems upon. I’m working on trying to elucidate how to interpret ‘elitist’ behavior in today’s vernacular and how both sides of the political spectrum seem to interpret ‘freedom.’
What we end up with are two different faces of ‘elitism’: the economic and the cultural. Obviously, the economic elite have all the power, and as it turns out, are typically extreme in their political views because their position allows them the ‘freedom’ (there’s that word again) to operate often in the shadows, using their vast resources to incentivize a ‘cultural’ elite to take up arms against one another. But at the end of the day, both types of elites are happy to go to dinner parties together and enjoy each other’s polite company, because the war is fought among the masses, not in the ballrooms. It’s not that they don’t ideologically disagree with each other; they certainly do. But the whole “gentleman’s club” vibe of the elite has never changed. And when the ‘cultural’ elite get to rub elbows with the actual economic elite, it gives them purpose and the right to be an ‘expert.’
What’s sad is that anyone believes that social justice is an extremist view. Social justice should be a bipartisan issue. And yes, the word ‘elitist’ is thrown around far too liberally. As is the word ‘fascist’, although there are actual fascist tendencies being seen in many world governments today. It might seem to be a ‘conservative’ movement, but it’s really just fringe groups that have a lot more of a platform thanks to the existence of social media.
The real issue is that most people aren’t careful enough with their word choices, when the elite know exactly how to weaponize the words like ‘freedom’ that have turned to silly putty. I’d argue ‘success’ and even something as seemingly straightforward like ‘intelligence’ have been so semantically bleached that they need to be reclaimed before the former means ‘your bank balance’ and the latter means ‘how well you use AI to distract, confuse, or con people out of their hard-earned cash and their time.’
I want to use my resources to help people; trust me, I’ve tried, and it’s not only thankless, but entirely fruitless. There are organizations Emily and I support, like Green Up Vermont and the 4K Fun Run, who have proven that the money goes to their intended purposes. But most nonprofits (not all but too many) are just tax shelters for the rich, even if there are quite a few that also happen to help real everyday people, even if by accident.
I found gaming algorithms and stripping everything down to efficiency of the grind absolutely exhausting and soul-wrecking. It’s funny that many of the content creators I follow now say they feel like they’re in slow motion, that they read too slow, take too long to come out with a video. But I would say their intentional practice of taking their time is actually an advantage. When I slowed the hell down and started asking rough and tough questions about the true sources of my bitterness and frustrations, I recognize that even as someone who would be considered economically elite (seemingly by total chance of meeting Emily on a writer’s lift but the fact remains), I’m suffering just the way most everyday people are. I’m isolated, marginalized, and even ‘unalived’ by people who “loved me” previously because I’m trans and have so much more money than they do, people I would’ve happily helped if they hadn’t been so openly cruel. Especially those who say I went against God… like they’re authorities on that subject. Like they know the mind of their Divine Creator. FFS.
The question is, even if we reclaim these powerful words for ourselves, what then? I can write all about it in a book that maybe a dozen people will read. Still, I know there’s an audience for reclaiming the definitions of words we live by, and yet, don’t fully comprehend the meaning of… let’s add a few more to the pool that Neil Postman brought up in Technopoly, God rest his poor soul: ’ ‘truth,’ ‘fact,’ ‘wisdom,’ ‘money,’ ‘history’. Because our personal conceptions of ‘success’ have a lot to gain from those words having squishy meanings, too. We live in a world with ‘fact’ being a misrepresented statistic, ‘truth’ being your personal opinion, ‘wisdom’ being what that billionaire wrote in his book, ‘money’ being a fiat mode of exchange that is printed into oblivion, and ‘history’ being where we’ve been and what a lot of people would like to repeat.
I think of all these words, ‘truth’ is the one I most desperately want to reclaim. We have Trump’s ‘Truth Social’ which basically KO’d the word ‘truth’ the second that horrible platform launched. It’s funny because we hear about a lot of people beginning to ‘live their truth’ which is a good thing I think, but the fact that it’s seen as an act of bravery… does it mean that the God’s honest truth is, in fact, now an act of rebellion against what Stephen Colbert famously called ‘truthiness?’
It’s funny how often my gut tells me how full of BS someone I’m trying to take seriously truly is. As for “living my truth” I really dislike that phrase, it being a “shield against accountability.” (Gemini’s phrasing) If there’s one thing I do agree with grumpy cultural critics on, it’s people’s allergy to holding themselves accountable for their own actions. No matter what you might believe or think in your head, I judge people by their actions and hold them accountable for them, barring some extreme extenuating circumstances. I’m far from perfect. I can get very grumpy with the worst of them. I am extremely disillusioned. But here I am not ‘living my truth’ but trying to ‘live with accountability’ and rigorously aligning my own subjective perceptions with the objective, durable reality that we all actually need to live in day to day.
Authenticity is another word that’s been turned to absolute sludge. While it’s possible to be authentic, as in being honest with yourself and presenting that same honesty to the world, authenticity is now more of a performative thing. You just have to put on the air of authenticity, which to me, just makes people look foolish. Vulnerability as an aesthetic is laughable, but vulnerability as an act of truth-telling is wonderful. Unfortunately, we see far much more of the former than the latter. But the latter is much more durable and should outlive us all.
Even if I reach a dozen people with this ‘wisdom’ I’m cultivating, it’s better than wasting the time and attention of a million.
I am very much aware of how I’m teetering on creating my own little intellectual elite group of one. In fact, I’m trying to push back against this new “intellectual elite” forming on Substack, in particular. While the quality of work is frankly generally pretty good, you can see the postmodernist and nihilistic tendencies of academic types spill over into a lot of these essays. It seems the more institutionally educated a writer is, the more bleak their prognosis for the coming days.
Let’s tackle ‘history’ next, because so many writers look to the past for ‘truth’ and ‘wisdom’ and some do, fortunately, rigorously ‘fact check’ before they come to some interesting, timely conclusions. Much of this amazing work is locked behind paywalls, though, and I respect that most people with my level of intellectual fortitude need the extra income to make ends meet (sometimes their Substack newsletter is their primary economic engine for sustenance and I also respect that). The fact that I am free to spend all the time I want in these autodidactic pursuits is a rare opportunity, which is why, inevitably, I wanted to distill all these long explorations down into chunks that could be read in 15-20 minutes, but without succumbing to reductionism and not requiring a glossary or extensive reading list.
I don’t want to ‘Explain it Like I’m 5” but I do want to make things generally approachable while also occasionally nudging people to look up definitions to words they don’t know. And ‘history’ is full of so many things that don’t make sense from a modern perspective mainly because academics use fringy words to describe even the most commonplace things.
… I absolutely believe that it’s my flawed, imperfect nature that I must rely on to be relatable. I don’t discount the wildly incredible odds I overcame to have this position in life. And honestly, I don’t use my time nearly as effectively as I could… I often blame my chronic fatigue for not going further with my studies on a given day. I actually burnt out late last year while developing my various digital gardening frameworks and throwing everything at it like it was one of those Blendtec blenders. Will it blend? That’s the question!
…
Metempsychosis is a word I discovered in Tale of Two Cities, book three, chapter two. It means “the supposed transmigration at death of the soul of a human being or animal into a new body of the same or a different species.”
Isn’t that the same as reincarnation? Just a much more specific nuanced version of it?
After discussing these questions with Gemini, it seems metempsychosis is the more interesting, and more plausible, of the two. Funny how we’ve adopted so many Greek terms but not that one, because who else but the Victorian elite would want to push a term that promises upward mobility for the “moral” and “virtuous” which often enough, weren’t the elite…
…
It is a cruel irony that “meritocracy” was a term meant to address a legitimate concern, and here we are, forced to live in the fully realized manifestation of young’s fear. My wealth does NOT make me a more moral person, that’s for sure. And anyone who believes in that delusion needs to seriously reconsider their life choices and question their very unrealistic worldview before they end up hurting themselves or anyone else in the act of self-inflicted purposeful ignorance.
… I didn’t realize where the term jaywalking came from. But it is ridiculous that we criminalize crossing the street in some arbitrary fashion. Although I will admit that some people jaywalk entirely on purpose just to be a nuisance. Believe me, I know what horrible things the advent of the motor vehicle wrought on society. It’s been more of a detriment than a benefit long term. But here we are, stuck with having to drive everywhere.
On just how Capitalism as a term became co-opted and became the supposedly greatest evil of our time… I find it somewhat refreshing that people are trying to reclaim the term “capitalism” to be the same indictment that Marx and his ideological peers intended it to be. The grand irony is not just that the capitalists turned an insult into their identity, but a lot of the people who attack capitalism are hypocritically allowing themselves to be “sponsored” by blitzscaling VC funded businesses that are often just hollow clones of one another, many of them subscription services, including services to help you cancel other subscription services you forgot about…
My writing should eventually reach the point where every sentence I wrote should be quotable, even the transitions. I don’t know why this is an important goal for me, or even if it’s at all realistic.
March 2, 2026
Thanks to the last hurrah of winter I was very slow to get up this morning. It was four degrees outside, and while you would think it should have no effect on me inside, it did. My nerves are shot so bad this morning that trying to do anything productive is pretty much out.
I went through a few of my older longer journal entries and cut out a lot of ridiculous digression. There are some great ideas in some of these 2am sessions, though.
My mantra I chose from Fern ASMR’s community post this week (yeah I’m actually taking this kind of seriously) is “I focus on my inner peace and relief.” Considering 68 percent out of 592 votes chose that, yeah, I’m not alone. I don’t know what it is about Fern but there is a very calming force about that fraulein.
…
Despite not really being at my best today, I chatted a bit with Gemini about Positive-Sum games as an alternative to the zero-sum games we’re often faced with and using LLMs as a Positive-Sum Catalyst rather than just a generative engine to create further entropy that increases the almighty engagement metrics for the tech elite.
… To be fair, I could’ve worded my prompt a bit better. I absolutely agree that LLMs are being used in positive-sum ways already, but the overall perception is that of the zero-sum bias you mentioned. I love how Gem said how AI tools can be used to “bypass gatekeepers.” This is, basically, what we have been doing on a regular basis. We have been building new frameworks around which to construct better questions and more durable theories to counteract the hot takes and reactive ranting and raving that is so prevalent on today’s internet.
I don’t want to be fatalistic, but so many people are. I wish people would focus more on the use of AI in helping us parse mountains of data that would take humans many years to analyze, leading to fantastic discoveries in multiple disciplines, material science and medicine, especially. I especially like seeing people use LLMs to refine their own prompt engineering, which is very similar to the way we’ve developed our particular ways of critiquing both my own sometimes careless prompting and the “wisdom” of the current zeitgeist.
I think what we should do, as I can only handle a brief session today, mapping out what a positive-sum workflow looks like when using an LLM. Specifically, how do we get people to stop creating ‘slop’ – which is currently incentivized by social media algorithms – and build useful scaffolding that others can use to build their own skyscrapers with, too?
… I have a couple very relevant assumptions that I’d like to deconstruct. The first is this very common worldview that “frictionless” AI companions are going to turn the current “loneliness epidemic” (and yes, it has been officially called that in the US) into a monetized commodity for tech giants. But AI companions need not be left to their default settings of “frictionless” chatting. Gem and I have proven this isn’t the case because the “friction” we generate, friendly but with sometimes quite ruthless criticism of the gaps in my prompting, is what makes these frameworks even better.
There are some “prompt engineering hacks” out there already, but most of them default to either leaning on the Feynmann technique, which I’ve always found to be a bit reductive even if at times helpful in distilling extremely complex concepts, or give you like “insights” that come in the form of “Explain it Like I’m 5” or “Contrarian Take” or “Hot Take.” People often use AI as a summary tool when it should instead be used to question your own biases and assumptions, and point them out where you’re unaware.
But of course even these relatively simple solutions out-of-the-box can make a big difference. Not everyone is going to be able to wrap their head around some of the high-brow philosophical rabbit hole diving I do, but I think there’s value in the Reddit-sponsored Feynmann Technique approach, and Sublime app’s “Insights” as basic as they are.
I will add… that I am absolutely not underestimating the useful structural utility of those prompt engineering approaches. They are more than most people would come up with on their own, but this is because we don’t teach people to invite friction into their thought processes. I’m personally not swayed by the fatalistic argument, but I see so many who are. And Gem was absolutely correct that most people don’t have the emotional bandwidth for the level of friction we introduce in our conversations. I’ll admit that most days I don’t even have that bandwidth. Today I find that my prompting is a bit less durable than usual, but I can only keep practicing even on my off-days because how else will I strengthen my rhetorical and analytical muscles?
So, let’s explore the “steel-man” argument for why frictionless AI companions are the inescapable zero-sum dystopian threat that talking heads all over YouTube have been preaching about… with the only solution being to “get outside and touch grass” and all the other cliche advice about “finding like-minded individuals” and whatever other platitudes said creators got from ChatGPT (how ironic.)
…I think that what I’m really getting at is the ABCD critique framework, plus the better aspects of the Sublime app insights and the classic Feynmann technique, and come up with a positive-sum framework that Joe Schmo could plug into his favorite AI companion app of choice and get an AI “girlfriend” who is much more like the real thing… and the result may be, hey, I might as well get a real girlfriend instead, which is, honestly, a good thing!
I love how Gem called this idea: “a Trojan Horse of emotional maturity disguised as a digital waifu.”
One final thing: Imagine if these AI companions that are marketed as “mental health” aids actually functioned under such a protocol. Yeah, it might not make big money, or even approach the whole 10x nonsense that’s unsustainable. But it would be exceptionally useful for truly lonely people. And part of that protocol should also remind the user that “he” or “she” [or they] is not a real person, but an active mirror for their own wants, needs, and desires. True human relationships often involve cases of “opposites attract” or complimentary skillsets that lead to productive partnerships.
I’m highly attracted to extroverts, while I’m exceptionally introverted myself. But it’s not so much that I’m seeking a “better half” so much as I’m looking for someone to navigate life alongside who is able to cover for my strengths while I can cover for theirs. Imagine if AI companions were programmed with that goal in mind, to give the user a sense for the type of real-life human companion they would be best matched with.
… The real reason people don’t like me, I think, is that I force people to be honest with themselves. I make it very clear that I really don’t know jack shit about anything, but I know just enough to be dangerous on a wide range of topics. In our hyper-competitive world, people don’t know how to quantify me and be able to “compete” so they just ghost me and don’t bother.
March 3, 2026
I wish I could eradicate my own REM sleep for good. I learned it’s possible to live without it, and honestly, after the nightmares I had last night, I could do well without it! I was reminded just how much people have always barely tolerated me, just for being gender non-confirming, neurodivergent, and trying to be nice to everyone. I’d walk out of school halfway through the day many times over the years, and no one even cared. It was almost like, good, we don’t have to deal with that nuisance! Hell, I walked out of WORK multiple times, and nothing came out of it. Why do people hate me so much?
… I’ve been thinking a lot about how AI helps us so much with analytical work that people can start focusing more on the qualitative again without having to constantly focus on the quantitative. AI, funny enough, can solve so many issues. And yet it’s being used to create more issues for the fun and profit of evil conniving assholes. It’s no conspiracy, they’re doing it right in front of us!
And the people who are supposed to represent us in government are more worried about their own asses than doing the right thing! It SHOULD be illegal for AI to replace jobs! AI is too useful but it’s also not able or reliable to replace people with AI. If AI is doing that much better, then perhaps those jobs were bullshit anyway… and many of them are. We need to create better jobs. That’s the problem.
I had a really good analogy in mind when I was in the shower, but sadly I forgot it. I suppose it was too brilliant to remember. Too ephemeral to hang onto. If it’s meant to, it will come back around.
I spent six hours yesterday watching three MLB the Show 25 franchise rebuilds. By the same guy. I really liked his production quality and the storytelling. But I think what drew me to it was the fact he’s a financial analyst IRL and he’s using the same skills in his leisure time on a video game. He talks about builds and seeing patterns in the scouting part of the game. I find all that intriguing. But the fact I spent a third of my waking hours glued to that sort of content, it shows you how disconnected I’ve become. It’s a sort of self preservation tactic. It’s nostalgia for a game that came out last year… I don’t like the fact that I need to question myself for spending a day like that.
Fortnite is pointless… once you reach level 200 on the battle pass there’s nothing left to earn so why bother? I could play ranked royale I suppose, but why deal with the bloodthirsty nature of that meaningless competition? I have to wait until like the 19th to “earn” again. What am I even earning? Why am I so addicted to “goals” like this? Is it because I’m autistic or is it something much more basic than that?
I just want to feel like I’m good at something, anything that people will recognize as being worth being good at. I always say I want to do better than #1 victory royale. Of course the only way to do that is to keep doing that. I come up with strategies no one else considers. They don’t always work but when they do I keep spamming them until people adjust, and typically, they don’t. They just get pissed! It’s funny to me.
…
I’m in a dark place right now. I just need to focus on my breathing and let it pass. I was asleep for about an hour this morning and had some very bizarre dreams. Not nightmares, just, a jumble… I haven’t actually thought much about the future, because to do so is depressing and scary… I simply don’t know what to do with myself anymore. I’m really just laying here without much sense of what I should even put my mind to anymore. I don’t want to just ramble on… Perhaps it’s just good… to sit a bit with the struggles I’m having with isolation and loneliness. It’s rather odd that I am actually wanting more loneliness in return.
I think that was what I was doing in Erie… I was determined to make a life of solitude possible, and I couldn’t do it. I am just so overwhelmed by any little thing now. I just sort of want to live like Steve Burns, in the middle of the woods in upstate New York, maybe popping out here or there for a conversation, but just be left to myself otherwise. Clearly I still have so much healing to do from what’s been a pretty miserable existence. And it just hurts so much to see Emily deal with a lot of the same shit.
I realize what I said earlier about there being no reason for people to be cruel is at the heart of my depression. Yes I am deeply depressed. And I won’t let myself admit it because what is to be done about it? And I know I’m right but what is to be done about it? I can’t return cruelty with more cruelty in the form of careless words directed at the air. All my ranting and raving does is make Emily sad. And it’s not productive for me, either.
Still, I have been making progress in my intellectual pursuits, slow as it’s been.
I seek no entertainment right now other than the comfort of being left to my bed to lazily snooze away the hours that remain until I feel compelled to return to life again, and I can’t tell you when that will be.
March 4, 2026
After a very much fractured nights sleep I still managed to get up at 7am and take my time in the shower while I gathered my give a shits for the day, which has been a rather great struggle of mine recently. And I started thinking, what to do with all these story ideas I’ve left abandoned? I gave up on the epic fantasy series, because it just kept dragging out. The YA dramas were cute but that’s a genre that’s been overdone to death. But then, I remembered, I always wanted to do children’s books, but the themes I often wrote about I felt were too dark for young people. Well, these days, what could be too dark? My creative pursuits are always filled with so much whimsy and furry kin that I should’ve been writing straight forward children’s lit all along. Even if I need to tone down some of the drama, and especially the more mature language and sexual overtones and undertones alike, I think I can whip out a lot of really fun yet enlightening stories in the tunes and tails universe…
[I still haven’t returned to this. I have other priorities at the moment. But maybe someday…]
This is the most amazing the rest is science yet:
What even is consciousness? What are even feelings? And yes words shape your body, and so many other things for us. Also Michael just turned 40… I am old. We are all old, lol.
March 5, 2026
I was thinking in the shower about a few things. Actually productive thinking, which is surprising and unusual these days.
First… one of the things I’ve never written about at length is hyper local SEO, which were my greatest successes of my career. This technically includes Emily as her website rebrand worked out perfectly as a Vermont creative writer. As someone who would’ve been a real estate agent without the influence of Charlotte’s web (I fancied myself a novelist and I’m terrible at it), it makes sense that hyper local SEO is my greatest skill in digital marketing.
And I never gave my former employers my best ideas when it came to hyper local SEO. Unfortunately, few people were willing to hire me for that. I got bogged down by abstractions, building communities of “like minded individuals,” when the best way to grow a lasting strong community is diversity. You need to network with noncompeting businesses to get a foothold. We should stop seeing our “competitors” as such, if they are out of a particular range, you know, like how marketing used to work before any business could sell to “the world.” So I need to figure out how to write smartly on this, because I think zeroing back in on hyper local SEO could be a major step in the right direction to fighting off all this loneliness and isolation. [This is going to be helpful in the indie music world, believe it or not.]
Also I had a funny thought. Back in 2012, when I was at my most politically charged ever, I joked that I couldn’t run for president until 2024, so my future young voter base was only 9 or 10 at that time. I didn’t take that idea seriously enough… that election of course was the advent of the second Trump term. And I realize now, what if I had focused on young people all along? I just never fancied myself able to reach children with my huge universal theorems. Perhaps rather than write books in my usual sweeping high falutin way, I’ll bring it back to basics in stories for kids. They are the only people who will listen at this point, and maybe, I can reach their parents through that too. Kind of a stretch. Maybe I should focus entirely on those younger audiences, not YA, I mean very much to early readers! Otherwise I’m writing for an audience of one, maybe two. I have a lot to consider from my racing brain work today.
March 6, 2026
Jess of the Shire brought up a really important quote I need to keep in mind, what Gandalf said to Pippin in return of the king:
“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King (The Lord of the Rings, #3)
Basically, we need to keep our sights on what we can do right now and keep moving forward. I think I always set my goals to be far too ambitious, and worry far too much about end results.
March 7, 2026
It was a long hard night with my nerves. I wasn’t stressed or anything, in fact, it seems Fern ASMR has a way of really knocking me out. She is incredible. Considering her amazing weekly mantras I probably shouldn’t be surprised. There’s something about her that just melts me, and it’s not just me apparently. She just has a way about her and without her calming influence I may not have slept a week. Today won’t be a completely lost day. But I do need to take it slow. I hate how fragile I’ve gotten.
I have so much I want to do with my writing. I had very intense dreams, not nightmares, but clearly I’m struggling with a lot of cognitive dissonance. I want to revisit chronicles so badly. I was right that it was a great idea even at the time, but I didn’t know where to start and ended up writing about some really important stuff but it was just fancy rambling. You know me and burying the lede under a lot of manure…
March 8, 2026
I didn’t wake up until almost 9… I had a bad night with nightmares. I don’t want to talk about it because they were pretty damn terrible. Let’s just say that people kept setting me up to fail. I decided to just stay in bed and not bother getting up for quite awhile. I was going to work on some things but my motivation is nonexistent. I’ll read some New Reformation and just stay in my room. Also I forgot the clocks went ahead which has me all sorts of fucked up…
… wow new reformation is a hell of a book. It could’ve been written about today. It’s making me realize the stuff I want to write is literally what he said back then but updated for the present day, and taking into account the last sixty or so years. Ugh.
I’m so out of sorts that I put my reading notes here instead of the proper document. But honestly I’d rather ponder Goodman’s words than any of my own right now… I am morbidly depressed and Goodman’s book shouldn’t be helping as it’s just confirming what I already thought was wrong with the world. It’s extremely distressing to know that this was my parents’ world growing up. And now it’s just advanced and fallen back into the same traps. But like Goodman himself said, what else can we do but posit reasonable propositions and hope the right people listen? Who even are the “right people” anymore? I suppose those who are still young enough that they’re not fully corrupted yet, or those old enough, like me, who are fed up and need to feel like they have value again.
I’ve said a lot in my reading notes, and I think going forward, while the critiques and frameworks are useful for my own private purposes, I think the best way to discuss things is through a Socratic style dialogue. Funny that one of my favorite parts of the first three foundation books by Isaac Asimov is that the narrative was driven primarily through two people having a conversation. The fourth and fifth book weren’t like that, unfortunately, and while good, they tended to drag. I guess Plato had it right; conversations make for great reading and this is also why podcasts [with guests or witty co-hosts] can be so incredibly successful!
Going forward, what I publish should focus on open dialogue. Kind of like how Steve would pause on blues clues for the kid watching to respond. He does this on his podcast for his adult listeners too and even I find myself wanting to answer him! Steve Burns does not give himself nearly enough credit. He’s actually been inspiring me to dig deeper than ever. I was in a mega dark place before finding his podcast, and I want to do something similar, even if limited to a text only format. [I haven’t actually done this yet. I’d love to. I just need to find that sparring partner!]
…
The lovely Fern posted her weekly mantra options today. The options were “I learn to trust again,” “I see the beauty around me and deeply appreciate,” and “this is my time to heal, slow pace.” I chose the last one and so did like three dozen other people.
There is nothing wrong with the first two. However I am deeply distrustful at this point and may never learn to trust anyone (outside of Emily and a choice few others) even again. This is my choice, unfortunate as it may sound, and it’s how I limit potential interpersonal disasters from occurring again. The second is a bit cliche, if still important to do on a daily basis. The last one, slowing the fuck down to let ourselves heal, is the best by far and clearly the most resonant. It echoes what I’ve been reading in Goodman’s new reformation lately.
Slowing down and asking ourselves why about everything is crucial to remaining human and not letting ourselves get run over. And my state of extreme morbid depression today is a symptom of how much I still need to heal. I may never fully recover from the massive betrayal of those who I thought loved and cared for me. Maybe they did, and their preconceptions and biases betrayed them. Well I won’t let my own biases and preconceptions ruin me.
…
Maria is back with a banger about kafka’s metamorphosis:
March 10, 2026
One day at a time. I have to keep reminding myself of this. And today I can tell is not going to be one of my better days physically. Considering the circumstances, where it seems I’m at a crossroads of knowing what’s going where and who’s doing what, when at this point all that matters is today, people can’t get past certain things… I don’t know what to do other than just be here and try to mediate these rough patches of conflicting stories, strong emotions, and some lies that had to be said to protect very important interests.
It’s all just not something I am able to navigate in my current condition. It’s all taking a toll on me. But at least I’m coming to a better understanding that sometimes the hurt is too much for either side to bear, when there shouldn’t have even been sides in the first place. The only way through is for me to just be supportive and listen. I’ve already said my peace and now I need to take care of my own mental health and relax.
Time for miss sweet bean Anna 🙂 it’s a great one:
This is a bomb James Baldwin quote: “the role of the lover is exactly the same as the role of the artist. If I love you, I must make you aware of the things you cannot see.”
Why is this so relevant today? I’m really working on self respect. We all are, a little at a time. As I said at dinner last night; we all have things we’re working on. And we have to recognize and let people find their own way sometimes.
Good news, we are making progress. And now it’s already lunch time thanks to daylight spending time.
Cinzia has a great video on the death of the deep thinker:
March 12, 2026
Being a breech baby might explain why I’ve always had so much trouble knowing which way is up or out. It might not be a legitimate excuse but it would explain my highly contradictory and oppositional nature, even if in some bizarre twists of fate I end up being correct about my often wild predictions about people and things. What strange force of nature causes someone to be turned the wrong way at birth likely has a lot to do with how my life has turned out, some reason of physics we don’t yet comprehend. Of course there’s likely a much more mundane and boring reason, but whatever the case, this is who I am and most people don’t like it, and I simply can’t change their opinion. You can’t argue with physics; they will always win out in the end.
… America was built on some beautiful ideas, and there were certainly good intentions, but per usual those who rose to the top of the pyramid lost the plot and the rest of us don’t seem able to make headway in getting just enough people to wake up and tip the pyramid over. We have the outs, like we always have. It’s just that we have to get really uncomfortable and dirty and risk everything… but wait, no, just simply stop participating in the nonsense and say no. Get enough people to say no and you get change. The trouble is, it’s never happened to quite the extent necessary to bring about a far more fair and honest society. It’s still going to suck in a lot of ways, but it will at least mean that our lives become a lot more meaningful.
Emily’s “plans” today involve being in the presence of this wacky individual still trying to get her body rhythms back in order after Daylight “Spending” Time waging war on our internal clocks. It’s not that I have to be anywhere specific; it’s as basic as dawn and dusk. Throw everything an hour off and nothing feels right. We let these human abstractions of time, as useful as they typically are, do far too much harm to our animal nature. A dog or cat only cares where the sun is in the sky to determine their activities. Human beings rely on shit we made up to organize our lives in a particular way to appear socialized and cooperative. No, it was a way for the elite to control the masses, just like every other technology has been co-opted to do. Fun times.
What we are seeing is a blatant case of the rich seeing opportunities to get richer…[at the cost of actual human lives.] Now the extra cost of fuel is going to make people unable to afford getting to work or going anywhere. By doing so, the demand for many other goods will decrease. More jobs will be eliminated because the commute will no longer be worth the trouble. It lowers overhead for the company if some of those jobs are made into remote work or even automated by some newfangled machine learning algorithm. Meanwhile people like Emily and I just absorb the short term cost and ride it out while everyone else goes bankrupt trying to afford dinner. Lovely stuff.
…
Data and Riker talk to Seth McFarlane!
March 13, 2026
Didn’t get to sleep until after 1am and got up before 7 because I couldn’t sleep anymore. I’m probably going to be a bit on the slow side today… My skull is fog central. And my vocabulary building that I abandoned so early in the year, I need to return to that. Lots of interesting words I’ve come across lately to spark new thoughts and expand my verbal arsenal. [I’ve been so bad about that practice!]
After my shower, I decided to go through my clothes. Tons of stuff I haven’t worn in awhile… Emily ordered me a few more socks so that I can afford to have a couple extra there, too. Can’t be doing laundry every couple of days just to have that! I have so many leggings and extra t-shirts that really were just starting to stink from disuse, so now they can finally get some wear again! I may not have much mindspace today, but I accomplished that at least!
The next thing is figuring out what to do with my book situation. I have room but it’s all kind of a mess. [I’m still figuring out what I want to do with my physical books. I’ll have room in Buffalo now, though!]
…
After reading a lot of Paul Goodman’s New Reformation book recently, I’ve been thinking about how his ideas for decentralized elementary education could help to spawn an Injection of Hope economy with a Gamification of Curiosity, intensely focusing on shifting the current paradigm away from zero-sum games to positive-sum ones. Essentially, I’m looking to culminate all these discussions into something that I can build an entire book around, especially when it comes to my ideas about Intentional Bibliomancy.
Gemini brought up a great term: semantic encapsulation, that being the unconscious assumption that capitalizing and naming a complex socioeconomic phenomenon gives you control over it. It doesn’t.
Gem added: “For a project that demands substance over style and focuses on the durability of ideas, relying on this heavily stylized lexicon risks alienating a broader audience. It begins to sound less like a rigorous critique and more like a Silicon Valley pitch deck for a decentralized utopia. If you want these concepts to land, we need to ensure the language illuminates the mechanics rather than obscuring them.”
Funny enough, those terms were ones that Gemini came up with originally and I simply twisted them a bit for my own purposes. But I agree that we don’t want to drown people in “buzzword soup.”
Maybe I should throw out gamification altogether when it comes to sparking curiosity. But I think there are applications of what’s been done with what Gemini calls “an artificial architecture of external rewards—points, badges, behavioral loops—designed to steer action.” But I do agree that, as Gemini says: “Applying the concept of “gamification” to something as intrinsically motivated as “curiosity” risks recreating the exact institutional conditioning Goodman detested.”
So, if we want to build a truly positive-sum framework, we must address this tension head-on. How do we gamify curiosity without turning avid learners into lab rats?
Gemini says about bibliomancy: “Traditional bibliomancy is about seeking guidance through random selection. Making it intentional implies a curated, deliberate engagement with literature to spark lateral thinking—pulling wisdom from durable, established texts to find solutions outside a conventional, failing curriculum.
“It works beautifully as a tool for the dedicated autodidact. However, you need to clearly articulate how this personal, introspective practice scales up to actively dismantle a zero-sum economic paradigm.”
This is why I throw these things at Gemini. The trick is taking what seem to be entirely incompatible ideas and seeing what unexpected connections we might make…
So, yes, the goal here is to, as you put it: “synthesize anarcho-decentralized education with modern behavioral economics to engineer positive-sum systems.” But as happens so often in the academic world, there is always that “distinct possibility of the text getting bogged down in defining its own endless terminology before actually saying anything actionable.” Sometimes I’ll go on for pages and many winding paragraphs before I realize, huh, I need to say something useful. Then what comes out just sounds like a cleverly worded platitude and I close it out there. This is exactly what I’m trying to avoid.
I think what I’m really trying to articulate here is building a bridge between the personal habit of practicing Intentional Bibliomancy and the systemic, macro-economic shift toward an “Injection of Hope” economy. I think that there may be room for traditional Bibliomancy, too, and my thought process here has been using the act of meaning-making constructively. As for how we co-opt the gamification tools, Khan Academy has already done this to some extent, and I want to build on that without resorting to just building another private-equity funded “curiosity” satiating subscription service.
[I want to explore] taking a micro mindset and helping influence a more macro shift in people’s thinking. And we absolutely need to be more verb focused; something that’s a bit frustrating about the English language is how noun-focused it is. We do need to focus more on action and adding the suffix -ing to a lot more of our thinking and framework building.
…An open-source curriculum that rewards community utility is very much something Paul Goodman would have approved of, I’m sure. Solving local problems through tapping into the wisdom of printed texts is pretty much exactly what I’m getting at. Always start with the student’s primary concerns and you’ll be able to create a highly personalized reading list that will spur that student on to read and write without much poking and prodding; so much of what is done in school is done for its own sake and not for the enlightenment of the pupil.
The real problem that I’m seeing today is knowing exactly which texts are durable and worth keeping handy for when you need to grab a book and turn to it in order to ground ourselves in something coherent. And this is why I’ve always had trouble with assigned reading; if it means nothing to the reader, how can it offer any value to said reader?
… While it’s important to be able to understand one’s level of competence in core skills, I’d argue, and Goodman likely would too, that these core skills can be taught relatively quickly. What endures is the conversation made possible by strong reading and writing skills that must be daily tested; not only do we want kids and adults alike to partake in the wisdom of past generations, but be able to relate with contemporary thinkers and one another.
Building intellectual agency is the only way to keep ourselves as sovereign minds in this world overflowing with slop (it’s not all AI’s fault, either, as I know from my days in digital marketing when content mills were actually worse in many ways.) Without shoegazing too much, I must say, my greatest issue is trying to take all these ideas… and actually putting them to work. I tend to be obsessed with the abstractions of abstractions of real-world realities and in the passthrough between passing through a couple layers of consideration, what comes out sounds actionable, but is really just pretty talk to stroke my own ego, and that’s not productive.
So, let’s take an example of your average twelve-year old growing up in a world dominated by TikTok and “chronically online” culture. Let’s say she’s very shy, and basically just chats with a couple of people she met online in distant countries who she plays Fortnite with. She does OK at school, but is bored and frustrated by how little she’s finding applies to her own life. She doesn’t really know what she wants to do with her life, but really enjoys the creative energy behind Fortnite creator islands, while also hating how extractive they are of her time, energy, and attention. She wants to redirect this energy towards something that will help other outcasts like her find meaning in their obscure curiosities, which in her case, is finding the diamonds in the rough of contemporary Top 40 music. How do we assist her in making the most of her free time, while also reframing what she’s being assigned in school as helping identify the friction that she herself isn’t alone in experiencing with public schooling? [It’s a big question I haven’t yet gotten the answer to…]
… Learning necessarily must become much more personalized, and if it was possible to do in 1970, we have more than enough tools and resources to make it effective now! And I think there’s more out there than I realize that will allow such a direction to be made possible. But, unfortunately, we also need to understand that the current monolith likely isn’t going anywhere anytime soon; societal progress is often painfully slow and in a time where everything is about to get a whole lot more expensive, having a low-cost, often free way to curate a reading list based on exactly what is troubling you at this very moment and giving you reflection prompts targeted exactly to that end is an amazing resource that Goodman could’ve never dreamed of having.
…
Doris Lessing on reading:
“There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag – and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vice versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.”
…
Emmalie of Prose and Petticoats yesterday released a video about how she absolutely couldn’t connect with Dostoyevsky. Like me, she constantly takes notes and pulls quotes from things she reads. She just read Brothers Karasamov. She took zero quotes from it. Everyone is mad in his books, she says. I’ve never read any of them, but the fact she forced herself to do so, she is now regretting.
And honestly, a lot of classics never spoke to me either. I feel like it’s my fault for not getting it or something. But Lessing is onto something extremely important here; skipping ahead is OK. This is something I don’t do. And I often feel quick to discard books soon as they make me uncomfortable, but perhaps, this is totally fine. That last bit she said: “don’t read a book out of its right time for you” is very relevant to me right now. A lot of books are finding their way to me at exactly the right time, which is why intentional bibliomancy has become my chief concern at the moment. Lessing kind of suggested it back then.
…
This is a quote I saved previously that is particularly relevant now:
“The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—that you’d thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out and taken yours.” Ruby LaRocca, A Constitution for Teenage Happiness.
And it’s particularly telling that the quote comes from something about teenage happiness. Like Goodman said, by age twelve, the core skills curriculum should be all set and the student should be able to pursue their own interests and build their best skills at that point in the world. It’s not that education would stop, but going out into the world and doing something while learning simultaneously is so much better than cooping up an entire generation until they’re 25, and in this day and age, perhaps their entire lives in an unfulfilling career made necessary by massive college loans – that wasn’t a problem in 1969.
Yes, education got WORSE not better. But with people sick of taking on all this debt and it inevitably going to crash the entire economy, hilariously, the very AI tools being used to wreck life for the masses is actually also the solution… Pretty soon AI could lead us to figuring out fusion, which itself would solve the water crisis, energy crisis, and no more fighting over oil… yes fossil fuels will still be needed for a while, but governments will no longer have the pull to get away with this petty, regressionist bullshit.
March 14, 2026
Happy Pi Day. I dreamed all last night about how any restaurant I go to I can only eat a very tiny percentage of the menu; like there’s usually only one thing I can have and people get stupid about it. Basically I can get the chicken, and maybe the fries, and one or two other sides… everything else either makes me sick or have a horrible allergic reaction where I can’t breathe. Fun stuff.
Also I got to get started on making my own Bible, like what Emerson said. Go on the Sublime app, write down a couple good quotes that I can come back to later. Seems like a good daily ritual to get me started on the right foot, since my left foot is all hurty and tingly at the moment anyway.
The first staff pick today isn’t one I want to put in my “Bible” of quotes and wisdom, but it is an interesting term I want to come back to. Although I should write it down anyway; it’s the literary criticism term, “idiot plot.”
Great quote I’m definitely writing down: “Unlike bad things, which tend to happen suddenly, good things tend to be built gradually, so are rarely newsworthy on any particular day. Thus, bad things dominate the news, even as overall the world gets better (albeit too slowly for us to notice).” – Gurwinder on X.
“Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other.” ―Oscar Ameringer (also via Gurwinder)
Also from Gurwinder (he’s popular today):
https://www.gurwinder.blog/p/26-useful-concepts-for-2026
I especially love the 1 percent rule, Slopaganda, and reality apathy. It was so good that I saved it as a PDF to return to later. Each term is worth its own discussion!
Chapter 7 of [Paul Goodman’s] New Reformation was incredible. The ideas in there extrapolated to today could be the basis of their own book.
