logloglog
Here’s a change log of my consciousness. Starting in December 2021, I’ve been capturing my ideas through the day, and then publishing them to my site the next morning. I’ve written about the benefits, its origins, and a 2-year reflection. Here are the log archives (WIP).
May 6th, 2024
Recently, I've been paying extra attention to topic sentences too, which are kind of like an extended version of a paragraph title. During one of the live sessions I wrote, "Clear topic sentences for insane paragraphs." A clear topic sentence helps frame the sentences ahead, and links the whole unit to the larger point of an essay.
Editing is something most people hate, so it’s worth coining new metaphors (ie: alchemy) to make it more approachable and endurable.
New sources around alchemy:
"Alchemy: The Poetry of Matter" by Brian Cotnoir
The Ezra Klein Show: This Conversation Made Me a Sharper Editor -- talks about the process of creating something from nothing, super relevant to drafting and the experience of the "rewrite" from a visual artist perspective.
The Ezra Klein Show: Best of: George Saunders on Kindness in a Cruel World -- talks about how editing allows you to explore different perspectives or lenses of your own mindset… by the time you're done, you may have actually changed how you feel or who you are in some small way.
Social media posting should have the formality of a text message.
Montaigne’s handwriting is incredible. You see him writing on and in the margins of his essay. I’m not sure how much restructuring actually went on, and how much was further explorations, and meta-streams on old ideas. TBD. Still. It’s a neat and analog form of externalized though.
There’s definitely a place for stream of consciousness. My sense is that the more analytical, slow, and entrenched my editing process for long form is, the better my one-take typewriter essays are. There’s a world in which the patterns of the craft become automatic, and over 50% of what you make is ready to go. I think it’s extremely rare to start here, but in most cases it’s something you can work towards.
Real-time stereotype inversion: as situations come into play, try to shape a stereotype as fast as you can, WHILE ALSO forming the inverse of that stereotype. See a person, situation, appearance, or etiquette as a set of opposites that are both true at the same time. That guys not rudely blasting shit music in a quiet neighborhood. It’s a party! Etc. It lets you see a mystery in every situation, and it’s ultimately humbling. It paints every perception as a vast range of potential instead of a fixed point, and it invites you to explore that instead of to assume you know it. It’s an “I-Though” relationship.
Wonderings of directional thrust; the pen wielder drags foots in fields of syrup. With each word comes a thousand thoughts, a thousand variants, a thousands simulations. The friction of shaping ornate letters enables a parallel process, where some second self maps the future. Is ink the well of poetry? Was it that obvious?
We underestimate how malleable our handwriting is. Penmanship is an art, a meditation, and unlocks a mode of being and creating.
Samskara — an “undigested emotion” that affects us through life. This reminds me Grof’s COEX’s. There might be moments of shame, or embarrassment, or cowardice. Why did that happen? What’s the source of that? By following down our negative virtues, you can get to the root, and then invert it into a positive virtue that address the core tension.
Each unit is within 4-8x apart from each other; each group is ~7,000x apart.
Micro units —
The Quantum (50 picoseconds) — the time for light to pass through hair;
The Atom (500 nanoseconds) — the time for light to travel a pen;
The Hertz (4 milliseconds) — a single violin string oscillation for a high C;
The Frame (25 milliseconds) — a single shot at 40 fps;
The Flash (150 milliseconds) — the time of a camera flash;
Little Units —
The Heartbeat (1 seconds) average human heartbeat;
The Blink (7 seconds) a short attention span;
The Breathe (45 seconds) 3 deep breaths;
The Moment (7 minutes) length of procrastination / a make-out;
The Episode (30 minutes) length of a sitcom;
Common Units —
The Flow (4 hours) half a work day;
The Sun (24 hours) earth’s rotation / human’s sleep cycle;
The Loop (7-10 days) Sunday - Sunday;
The Moon (28-31 days) a month, a moon loop;
The Season (125-200 days) 4ish months; a long spring;
Big Units —
The Molt (1,000 days, 3.7 years) time spent in high school;
The Epic (17 years) from birth to driver’s license;
The Life (69-85+ years) your whole existence;
The Era (342-425 years) many generations, the rise and fall of nations;
The Civilization (2,000 years) since JC;
Mega Units —
The Archaeon (20,000 years) from primitive to modern;
The Epoch (160,000 years) modern humans;
The Species (1.2 million years) since Homo erectus;
The Genus (10 million years) since upright hominids;
The Aeon (80 million years) from rats > humans ; radical morphing;
Cosmic Units —
The Eon (640 million years) since all animals;
The Precambrian (5 billion years) since Earth;
The Stelliferous (30 billion years) since the oldest stars;
The Degenerate (240 billion years) length of all possible stars;
The Dark (2 trillion years) the back hole period;
The Heat Death (16 trillion years) life, death, rebirth of space time.
I found myself talking through how I’d explain my view on religion to a priest. First I’d walk through the theology of God as a cosmic force. Then I’d talk through Jesus as the ultimate figure to embody in every moment. But then, I’d walk through how I don’t think Jesus is the literal and supernatural son of God, and how I think religion is tripped up and over-indexed on history & language. Jesus is a powerful myth, and that doesn’t diminish it all. Myths embodies virtues that you live up to, and Christianity converged a complex and confusing pantheon of pagan myths into a single mega-myth that captures the most important qualities of what we should strive to be.
Midway through my draft, AI rated the likeliness of my theory of evolution at a 3-4, but after I was done with it, it was up to a 6-7. For context, it scores the Stoned Ape Theory at a 2 and Darwin at a 9.
Submitted my essay for a book review contest at the last possible minute, 2:59 AM ET. The power of deadlines.
May 5th, 2024
"The Symbolic Species" (1997) Terrence Deacon, a biological anthropologist, argues in his book "The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain" that the human brain and language co-evolved, each influencing the development of the other. He posits that the use of symbolic language placed unique demands on the brain, driving its expansion and reorganization.
Would you rather work 8 hours a day on something you love, or 1 hour a day on something you’re indifferent towards? Either way, you still need to spend 8 hours in an office. Both jobs have the same pay.
The sphere of the alchemist:
Like Horus I see prosche forward,
An inverted ray of myth shoots back,
To the right is imagination chains,
To the left is architectural pattern,
Left and right rotate,
Counter-clockwise,
All sides stretching,
Creating a sphere,
Of attunment and being,
Of fusing the opposites,
Of doing and seeing,
May 4th, 2024
WOW! Just found out that even though McKenna was the first person to publish a hypothesis on The Stoned Ape theory, someone else was casually excited about in the 1970s … FRANCIS CRICK, the guy who discovered the DNA double helix (he’s like the polar opposite of McKenna, honored for his contribution on making sense of human genomics).
Crick never published this idea, but he’s told colleagues that, 1) LSD helped with creative breakthroughs, and 2) his theories on evolution. Look into Graham Hancock, Daily Mail, Dick Kemp, Roland Griffiths (seems like AI hallucinated some of these sources, be careful!)
Close to a deadline, I find it helpful to have an editing checklist (instead of endless tinkering and massaging). The goal is to have a publishable piece at all points. The checklist is a bunch of isolated incision. I tried using a 15-30 minute timer for each point. It’s about patching one spot, and upgrading it one part at a time.
So I took my last 5 jobs, and ranked them (1-4) across the core factors of what work should bring you (financial freedom, education, psychological wellness, a social life, and independence). There’s a pattern; a job will naturally be 1 out of 4 in one its dimension, and so naturally, the next move is about trying to improve that pillar. In the process, other pillars fall. Leaving the architecture industry, I saw a 50% boost in my score. For the next 3 job, they all scored basically the same, but the strengths/weakness struggled around. Now (as an independent writer), it’s gone another 50% up in score, and the goal is to keep this state going while making it more financially viable.
A compliment from AI on my essay draft. It’s funny that a machine can make me feel good, but it’s less about the praiser, and more about the language used:
The strongest points in its favor are the skillful prose, intellectual humility, and how it uses this case study to raise profound questions about language, evolution and the human mind that are of general interest.
Took a break from restructuring a long-form essay and meditated for a bit. The mind naturally went back to essay form. Instead of trying to “center,” I just let it run, and it was neat to see how I could resolve knots in the flow by stepping away. I could come back to the page with some concrete steps: ah, do A, B, C, etc.
May 3rd, 2024
Probably going to watch Avatar: The Last Airbender—a Nickelodeon kids show—a second time in full. It is loaded with alchemy symbolism. Behind the simple kid-friendly plot of each episode are rich patterns that can be written about and reflected on. It’s taking serious relationships in the psyche and rendering them through archetypal characters. I guess that’s what all great film/art should strive to do.
I realized that I’ve been avoiding setting a bold goal for my life, probably because I’ve been burnt by past goals. Right now, there’s a really practical, short-term goal of just sustaining myself as a writer. But once that works, then what? Maybe that’s it, but what’s beyond that? In my grandest vision for my life, I think I’d be an “architect,” in the visionary sense. I’ve got to redefine that word, because it has almost nothing to do with buildings. Well, of course it does, but the systems thinking behind a building is the same approach we need for computers, governments, religions, etc.
Destiny / destination.
All systems fail. All visions fail.
The physical struggle and value in building your own house (#one-day).
If Taylor Swift is bigger than Beatlemania, then it’s pretty wild to think how much cultural potential is stored in a single person. What if Taylor Swift took psychedelics and reached a new level of artistry, experimentation, and philosophy?
IKEA meanings: when we default to words and insights that are pre-packaged, shallow, or meaningless. It’s easy to get lost in a whole veneer of religious lingo, but it risks being over-index of signifiers instead of the embodied meaning behind the word. ie: It’s possible for a person to take non-religious actions, and yet, convince themselves they’re religious because of the language.
Creativity as applied schizophrenia.
Starting to get “chakras” beyond woo. The literal truth isn’t the point. The goal is to spatialize emotions and feelings. By saying, X feeling is located in Y place, and by doing that 10 or 100 or 1,000 time, you build an association. If you want to tap into that feeling, you can focus your attention to that spot of the body. So it’s a combination of 1) attention mastery, and 2) symbolic mapping. Maybe there’s reason why certain chakras are where they are, but I wonder if the exercise can be useful if you completely invert it.
Look into the 1960s shift from live performance to studio recordings. Obviously some bands like the Grateful Dead were the exception. And of course, live touring is still a big thing today. But I wonder if recording technology and distribution got to a point where “the master” recording was just place to focus songwriting efforts.
TITLE:
Go touch paper: How the Apple Vision Pro turned me from a VR-optimist into a techno-selectivist.
THESIS:
While emerging technology can woo us with convenience and awe, it risks distracting us from our goals, and devaluing our innately human capacities. Sometimes the way forward is to revert to analog technology. We're entering an age where the best-prepared stance is "techno-selectivist"; instead of being a luddite or an accelerationist, you need to scrutinize every feature you invite into your life.
Oxxxx xxx# , x#xx xxxx;
D | 4>3;
F#m | #1>1;
A | 6>5;
Em7 | 7>7>5>1.
Every essay needs a shiny dime, but a Core Idea is a shiny dime that you’re uniquely positioned to write. So for example, if I’m writing an essay on AI or human evolution, I’ll need a shiny dime, but those areas aren’t related to my experience/expertise. But, essays around architecture or virtual reality directly relate to what differentiates me. I see a Core Idea as a Shiny Dime within your Personal Monopoly.
When you pass 1,000 email subscribers, Substack will send you an email congratulating you, along with a procedural graphic that it encourages you to share. It’s okay to celebrate, but something feels braggy about doing this in public. And it steers discourse towards metrics and career goals instead of the actual work.
Two analog radios are more in sync than two TV or YouTube streams.
Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods, p.9:
"Psychedelic shamans now constitute a worldview and growing subculture of hyper-dimensional explorers, many of whom are scientifically sophisticated. A landscape is coming into focus, a region still glimpsed only dimly, but merging, claiming the attention of rational discourse--and possibly threatening to confound it.”
May 2nd, 2024
When I’m zoned in on an essay, I’m barely thinking or logging. I wonder if tunnel vision is a natural consequence of flow, or if there’s value in taking 2 minutes off every 20 minutes.
The “2D plane” is the plane for making sense of 1D linear arts (writing) or 3D spatial arts (architecture). It’s a middle ground where you can diagram to see the relationships between things. In the case of 1D>2D, you are “upshifting” to see patterns that aren’t visible. In the case of 3D>2D, you are “downshifting” to reduce complexity into something graspable.
The uncanny valley of essay quality (I only half believe this, but…). We tend to resonate essays that we can sense are quickly produced, or, essays that are masterpieces. But in the middle, it’s clearly took a lot of time, but the result or feeling is lacking.
Material: In addition to making the shiny dime explicit in the essay, it’s also grokked through supporting material (stories, anecdotes, theories, and facts). In many cases, the shiny dime is there, but it’s hiding between associated material that doesn’t quite support it. This is where we can tell them to add, cut, expand, or compress the units of their essay.
Rain was released on May 30th, 1966. I never thought of songs having birthdays, but could be neat to track culture events you care about, and then everyday, there’s a set of 5-10 things “On This Day” that are curated to you.
Every Oasis song is derivate of the Beatles song “Rain” (video).
May 1st, 2024
AVP as a microcosm of the 21st century technology dilemma.
90% of the meaning is in 10% of the words.
Death by convenience…
What are my favorite problems of the month? This always shifts. Worth tracking these in real-time to guide writing?
Hm, so if I use Sublime as a capture app, it means once a day I copy from here to Substack. And maybe any “aha’s” go straight here and skip handwriting. It reduces some busy work for sure.
Hello, Sublime! This is my first time logging into the mobile app. Wondering if there’s a value in going “direct to publish.” It forces me to write prose on the spot instead of leaving breadcrumbs. It forces me to write all day. I feel like I’ve had to learn this lesson 20 times. Maybe I’m dumb, or maybe it’s not a true conclusion. We’ll see. I also need to consolidate how digital logging jives with my new nifty analog system in the “decomposition” book.
New experiment; my iOS lock screen are “virtue cards.” Every time I open my phone, it shows me a virtue (currently 14 loaded in, they’re like mini-poems with key values I wan tot remember), and I can even tap to cycle through them. I made these really quickly in Canva.
Do monuments or buildings have revolutionary potential? How? My sense is that architecture is not a driver of culture, but a lagging reflection. At one point, architects could move the cultural needle, but I think that reality, if it ever actually existed beyond romanticism, is long gone, since probably before the 20th century. Architecture is unique from art in that it’s art+utility. In many ways, software has taken on this same function (it has an aesthetic to it, and it integrates into your life much in the way that buildings used to). I think the whole cultural relevance to architecture has retreated into the machine, and it’s more urgent than ever.
Did Kate Middleton disappear? Why? Did she die? Was she assassinated? Is she just embarrassed of the sickly way she looks? People are going paranoid in speculation. The only knowable thing is we’re at a point where it’s feasible for AI video to impersonate real celerities. This is part of the “trust flip.” We will get duped more and more, until we’re mostly duped and we no longer believe anything we don’t see in the flesh. This means that individuals can get hijacked by corporations or governments, or, they can simply retire and let their replica do the dog & pony show.
concrescence: the act of turning abstract potential into something tangible.
“This guy thinks” (proper reaction to a complex Miro board).
Went to a Sublime community talk today, which centered around how AI should or shouldn’t be integrated into the platform. I shared the idea that “creating over consuming” could be a guiding value. It’s a check you can use against every feature: even if this AI-generated summary is radically good, radically convenient, and everyone loves it, does it—if scaled—promote a community to create more and consume less? Or is it the opposite? If I paste a link and I know that an awesome summary will be auto-generated, maybe I get lazy and don’t feel pressure to share my reaction to it.
For social media style communities, it might be better to think of “matchmaking AI” instead of “generative AI.” If AI is creating text, it automates the need for the user to do it. Let creating always be in the hand of the user. Instead, AI can be used to help you place things in collections, to find cards relevant to yours, and to connect with people who share similar things.
I unpinned notification apps: email, Slack, iMessage, WhatsApp.
Checked my email again … 10 times in 4 hours, or every 25 minutes. This feels average, yet it’s also insane … how could I check it once a day? Would be interesting to have a “single shot” app. Basically, you’re allowed to use the thing ONCE, so when and how you check something matters.
My TikTok NPC essay captures the full phenomenon of our Internet crisis: influencers are taking on slavish, robotic personas to feed the dope-addled masses who want endlessly looping catch phrases.
Robots, hucksters, dope, and slang-parrots translates:
technological automation;
marketing, sales, influencers, etc.;
incentives that promote addiction, and;
mindlessness around language.
Instead of using Notion to track my budding essay ideas, I’m going to do it analog. Essay are ideas are fleeting, scarce, and expire so easily. Databases become burdens. These things are usually bloat that don’t even help you write or publish more. Once a month I archive my written list of leads and start over. It’s write or die.
Up at 3:30 am and back to sleep around 6. Had many, many mini dreams. Feels like this method (being awake for a few hours in the middle of the night) is a way to break into lucid dreams pretty easily.
My experiments with time are evolving. Phase 1 was to see what it was like to “get off the clocks”—what happens with no awareness of the time? I found myself budgeting time less. 2 months later, I still have my lock screen in Cambodian, my MacOS screensaver hides the time, and the system clock is analog. My watch/phone is now set to normal though, which isn’t as extreme, but I still see it a lot less. Now, the goal is to track/note when I DO know them time, and use that as a cue to return to the daily log, pause, and write about something. Also making a point to log any time I check email, and to write down any media rabbit holes I spiral down. The goal is to track it so I can see what’s actually going on.
Need to check out Milton’s Paradise Lost after hearing about it 3 times.
It takes time to write out “calendar views” in an analog bullet journal, but it’s still quicker than a digital system. The overall overhead of an analog system is a probably a lot less than a system of Notion databases (which can be endlessly tinkered). Plus, analog has the secondary benefit of using a pen.
April 30th, 2024
The “5 salaries” idea: jobs pay you financially, educationally, psychologically, socially, and in freedom.
Quote from The State of Culture (by Ted Gioia), resurfaced to me by Salman:
"The tech platforms aren't like the Medici in Florence, or those other rich patrons of the arts. They don't want to find the next Michelangelo or Mozart. They want to create a world of junkies—because they will be the dealers. Addiction is the goal."
Points on parallelism (re: essay structure)
Are supporting points consolidated, or spread out across the essay? Ideally, the thesis is distributed, but support material is singular (or at least, serving different functions or different levels of detail in each instance).
Is the structure explicit and legible to the readers? Are items clustered and articulated based on their hierarchy from the thesis? ie: Is the essay showing 5-10 equal points, when in reality, there are 2-3 themes among them.
Even if the overall structure is sound, are there details that are out of place?
Is there a universal set of questions that can be asked to test if a writer has uncovered all the scope relative to their thesis?
What is the % difference between IRL Michael and the online caricature of Michael Dean? Is it 1%, 5%, 20%? Can I even know that? In some ways, could the online self be more real than the IRL self? Could it be the frontier where I test and grow into facets of my identity?
quaternity — yesterday I wrote about four poles; I was seeing it as an overall map of virtues, but it’s also a micro-concept that’s fractally lodged in other virtues. Take kairos: “up” is the ability to perceive the field, “down” is knowing the opportunity of an action, “right” is the ability to flow into it, “left” is the technical skill required to execute.
April 29th, 2024
Maybe virtues shouldn’t come from an abstract ideal of yourself. Maybe they come from a fine-tuned perception of your own mind, and the structural ability to model your character. There’s a diligence required to observe your inner working, an analysis required to cluster patterns, and a creativity required to coin memorable frames that shape the grooves of your mind.
So basically, virtues are neither “feel first,” OR, “think first,” and you never start with the phrase. You have to dip into the messy reality, feel it, and then rationally distill that realm.
I’ve always thought of a virtue as compressed earned wisdom baked into a word that I repeat. I was thinking in large aspirational terms before (kairos, synthesis, patience, etc.) but now I’m thinking about it through “negative” virtues. Trying to take note of all the tiny moments throughout the day where I don’t live up to my fullest self (little sins, fears, anxieties, procrastinations, etc.). At the end of the week, I’ll look at the whole list, categorize them, and then create positive virtues that invert them.
I still don’t think people realize how reading the dictionary and immersing yourself in language is so important for your writing. I get funny, ranged reactions when I mention this new hobby to people.
April 28th, 2024
What writing prompts could lead to alchemical transformation?
What is your potential self pointlessly dying to?
Escape chronos through perception. Found myself getting stressed over a tight schedule (here by 11am! here by 2pm! here by 7pm!). Time can easily keep you in your head, in a realm of abstractions. But aesthetic observation puts you back in the body. It’s a frame shifter. As long as you have a decent plan, you can trust it and get out of your head.
My goal for Greek Orthodox Holy Week is to rapidly record my perceptions, make sense of them, build awareness of my negative virtues, and then shape postive virtues to live through over the next year.
April 27th, 2024
Value brainstorm:
patience: do slow, manual work, site with things, wonder, let things take their own course, don’t rush, let people have the time they need …
patterns: fractals, things at multiple scales, put things into visual to see the true nature of reality, abstractions are okay …
synthesis: fuse opposites, don’t take sides, find peace, let things co-exist, the alchemist …
kairos: present in the moment, see opportunity, bold action, swift, courage …
My neighborhood in Queens is filled with quick honkers. At a green light, if you’re half a second too slow, you get an angry honk. Happened to me. I imagined getting out of my car to talk with the driver behind me, only to find out he’s something like a 10’ preying mantis. He stabs me, and I go into a dream state, in a court filled with mantis people and I’m the alien, making a plea for why patience is an important virtue. In the end, my words are illegible and I get devoured by a 1,000 bugs. I wake up in my car, with Lawrence Fishbourne in the front seat. “What’s the lesson, Michael?” “To never get out of your car?” “Have patience for the impatience.” Weird daydream.
One of the lowest-hanging kairotic exercises is to make conversation with as many strangers as possible.
On looking — There’s an art and power to looking; when you can really see, and observe, and guide your attention to aesthetic specifics of something, it closes a thought loop. It’s centering, maybe even more than the breathe.
What if looking and breathe went together? For example; as I write this, I’m now focused on my peripherals, and I see my hands shaping letters, while breathing mindfully — it’s a vantage point re-frame.
Did not expect Jerry Seinfeld to be promoting transcendental meditation.
The closeups of the sun look like corn.
Let me know if you want a 3,000 word report on one of your essays! Can break it down over my 27 patterns and score it out of 135 points. It will give you insight into your strengths and areas to work on. Looking for feedback on my feedback, and how to structure this information to be digestible and actionable.
mewing (vb.) — this is now known as a practice to keep your tongue at the roof of your mouth to chisel your jaw, but the word “mew” has an older meaning: to imitate the sound of. The modern word comes from the inventor of the technique, John Mew. Interesting case of how a person’s name can coin something that’s more powerful than a historical, but faded word.
Which 5 virtues will lead you to your destiny?
Which 5 virtues do you want to re-order your consciousness around?
Religion answers our questions and prevents questioning of answers. Questions are the whole point. Character comes from questioning.
digital — comes from the digits (the fingers).
virtual reality — a “virtue” is a thing that re-orders your consciousness. So a virtual “reality” is a paradigm where the external world is digitally malleable and can imprint on you. The world, made of nothing but light, is a product of the creator’s virtues, too.
I’m noticing so many different frameworks map into the same “quaternity” (a cross, plus-sign, looking things, composed of two spectrums that criss-cross).
(direction) My word, Jung’s word, Gebser’s word, from Rooster’s diagram:
(up) Mindfulness, Sensation, Archaic, Sacramental
(down) Perspective, Intuition, Mythical, Gnostic
(right) Creativity, Feeling, Magical, Schizophrenic
(left) Discipline, Thinking, Rational, Autistic
Worth noting that the up-down pole is about seeing, and the left-right pole is about acting.
Can’t anticipate what life after kids will be like. Feels like the important thing is to not cling to the specific of your pre-kid life. You can’t expect certain habits or certain parts of your life to continue through exactly as it. Be open to the details, and just bring the same spirit, and the things that matter will find new form.
“Productivity” is knocking out 50 unimportant things at 2x speed. What’s a word for doing the thing that matters that you’re scared of?
The Pathless Path captures the idea that in the 21st century, everyone has to think like an artist. In a more stable world, people could conform to traditional life arcs. There were the few, the self-selected, who lived an artistic life: a quest into the unknown guided by self-discovery. Now, because of the shifting landscape, more and more people (whether they call themselves artists or not), find themselves operating in this way. What does it look like if everyone has a Kunstlerroman?
On the back of the dollar bill, there is a pyramid with the Egyptian eye of Horus. It speaks to your freedom to find your own pyramid, the right pyramid, the right hierarchy to climb — to evade false games, and find the ladder most suited to you — to climb towards self-actualization, in the domain that’s waiting for your arrival.
“Read the room.” Be agnostic to the details. Don’t cling to the plan. Have confidence to adjust on the fly. Life is an un-boudned game.
Kairos = “soft time”;
Chronos = “hard time”;
In Greek Mythology, Chronos (God of hard time) was in charge of the universe and he would eat all his children. Zeus escaped through a river (like Moses). Through mastering the feminine, and through escaping chronos into kairos (soft time), you sparkle, you wield lightning, and your reality is malleable. It’s not about conquering time or conquering death, but being attuned, bold, and swift, never flinching.
Stay humble, don’t cut ties,
Kerouac, America’s restless traveler,
was textbook momma’s boy.
Face death to dance through life, but don’t be so paranoid over the perfect dance that you sit on the side. Dance! You are in a field of patterns. See them, move through them, assume you’re in a dream.
Can’t quite know where you’re headed, but conform your unique self to the patterns of reality around you. In this sense, the destination/destiny is singular, but unknown.
What would you literally die for? Maybe you’d die for your spouse or family members, but maybe not your friends, but maybe some of them? (where’s the cutoff?) Some would die for their religion, or country, or company. Some die for honor. Really? For impact? Is any grade of impact worth losing the seat of your consciousness over?
If Tolkien’s soul were offered another life, but in exchange, we’d have to pivot to another reality where he had and could never have invented Lord of the Rings. Should he take it?
What creative project would you die for?
Would you give up your consciousness to shape the consciousness of the world? When is this noble and when is this insane?
The goal of religion should be to face death in the realist way possible. The common and shallow practice of religion today is about offloading the worry. What if you simulated it, faced it, confronted it? Instead, we abstract it into language and make it soft so we never get swallowed in it. Religion is real when it’s terrifying and hard and transformation and it’s no surprise that most parishioners stay in the shallow end.
Makes sense that it took LSD 100 years to integrate. Through history, thinks took centuries to develop, and this might be one of the most profound inventions ever: something like the atom bomb of transpersonal psychology. We got spooked, hid under the covers, and are slowly peaking out again.
The layered Trojan Horses of the psychedelic renaissance: to go from a research blackout to psychedelic churches, there are multiple steps in between. The 2010s was the “renaissance” in research, where the DEA/FDA allowed studies with cancer patients, veterans, and people with untreatable diseases. The 2020s will see the rise of “centers,” of places where you can go and take psychedelics with nurses and therapists on staff. By the 2030s, we’ll evolve to: “if we have all these centers, we might as well make them look beautiful.” Churches will be the next logical step. That would’ve been laughed at in the 2010s.
The terms “set and setting” are common in psychedelic use, but the term “matrix” (by Betty Eisner) is little known. Matrix is the cultural substratum that enable all possible set and settings to unfold within. Consider the difference in matrix between the summer of love and the following blackout and Ancient Greece where entheogens were state-controlled?
So a noble goal would be: how do you shift the matrix of a society? It’s the only form of activism that actually moves the needle, and it’s hard, if not impossible. Preaching to the people in your life, or preaching on the street, that’s usually just a distraction from focusing on yourself. A full like focused on the self might lead you to a rare, fleeting opportunity, where—maybe once in your life—you are within sight of a lever that can actually shift the tides of something.
You have two 10s in black jack. Hit! “Why can’t you play your hand?” Look up! This is just one hand, and I’ve suddenly become conscious inside of a casino. I don’t need to win this hand, and I don’t even need to play this game. Walk up, walk outside. There’s air out there. There’s a whole world outside this casino. And even the city around you is all a simulation; you can drive 30 minutes outside of Vegas and find the Red Rock Canyons, the original condition. There is a meta-skill in knowing which games to play, but so many people around you might see life as an endless confined game of blackjack.
Ted Hughes:
“And that’s how we measure out our real respect for people—by the degree of feeling they can register, the voltage of life they can carry and tolerate—and enjoy. End of sermon. As Buddha says: live like a might river. And as the old Greeks said: live as though all your ancestors were living again through you.”
McKenna and Watts — how come some of the best thinkers aren’t as sharp in their writing?
A friend mention that he had “been to hell” on a psychedelic trip and experience cosmic horror. “Been to hell.” I found humor in the phrasing. You’ve “been to hell”… and now you’re back here on Zoom? I thought hell was a one-way ticket? It frames hell not as “the bad place at the end of the line,” but something you can experience and survive and learn from in this lifetime. Perhaps one of my main avoidance of psychedelics is the idea of tripping into hell, but that seems to be part of it.
On college, I ran into a high school friend on the train, and told him that my thesis was about designing facilities for psychedelic therapy. He was confused. When he took shrooms in a car with his friends, they were just laughing hysterically for 3 hours over stupid shit. The idea of this being a medicine did not computer. Shows how at low doses, these things are extremely programmable.
How should psychedelics be legalized: the gas station model? The driver’s license model? The gun range model? (over the counter, after studying, or under supervision).
Psychedelic use in ancient and modern times … the modern brain has 20k words, so a psychoactive has a “scrambling” effect. But, in the Stoned Ape Theory, imagine a tripping hominid with only a bank of 20 words. It would be a different experience. In some ways, it’s probably more extreme for a creature trapped in their own constructs of langauge.
Psychedelics (and marijuana) disrupt local maxima. They break you out of an ecological rut, out of a pattern of thinking, out a rigid frame. It helps creative problems be seen in a new way. It shows wider sets of possibilities.
I like the Carlin saying of “get the message and hang up the phone.” Substances can teach your mind new pathways of thinking, but once they’re formed, you don’t need the substance anymore, and in fact, the substance is more likely to have other negative effects.
A good book is like a drug (Cat’s Cradle). It sticks with you.
As an editor, it’s a good idea to reserve “Fuck!” and “Amen” (the profane and sacred words) once per essay, at the moment something really hits or connects.
After 15-30 seconds of having my eyes closed, I can sort of see through. No color or details obviously, but I can see forms: dark outlines of shapes (ie: if I’m holding up 1 or 2 fingers. I assume that some light can get through the eyelids (I don’t see this if I block my eyes with my other hand). Also wonder if any of this is the mind spatially reconstructing it (ie: it creates the form based on the motion of your hand). Are shadow forms less detectable from someone else?
Udio (the AI song generator) can seriously penetrate the subconscious. It’s an earworm generator at scale. I find myself quietly yelling, “it’s time to write!” from that meme song I made for the editor team. What if you actually distilled your values and virtues into ear worms?
En route to complete a digital task, how likely is it that your attention gets hijacked? For example, say you jump to YouTube to get a URL for your own video; on the way, you come across a menu of 8 videos, and you find yourself watching one, forgetting why you originally showed up. The medium is high in “distractibility.” This is why paper OS’s are great.
April 26th, 2024
On using ellipsis (“…”) in quotes: If your’e omitting a few words within the sentence, you can use … to omit. But if you’re omitting a sentence or more, you put brackets around your ellipsis […]. Seems like a subtle thing, but modifying quotes can be pretty important. So often, I see people dropping 200-300 words quotes, when really, they should be compressing it to emphasize the meaning relevant to their essay. Within a quote, you can use ellipsis (“…” or “[…]”) to contract and brackets (“[ ]”) to expand.
“Complexity wrangler”…
Social media thwarts us from expanding our vocabulary. You get algorithmically punished for using words that aren’t familiar. Why is this? It is a “demotic force” that is throttling our language and our expression.
Aldous Huxley apparently read 30 volumes of the encyclopedia page by page. That’s a serious ad nauseam commitment to binging reference material in chronological order. (FWIW, all these dictionary facts are coming from Dictionary Days by Ilan Stavans.
John Witherspoon: America needs to “tighten it’s tongue.”
The Bible is often quoted as the most important book of our civilization. What about the dictionary? Didn’t John 1:1 says: “In the beginning was the Word (Logos), and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God”?
Aristotle said it is a responsibility to follow your talents. If you have X, it’s a shame to do Y.
Neruda’s 2 dictionary poems:
Dictionary, you are not a
tomb, sepulcher, grave,
tumulus, mausoleum,
but guard and keeper,
hidden fire,
groves of rubies,
living eternity
of essence,
depository of language
Dictionary, let one hand
of your thousand hands, one
of your thousand emeralds,
a
single drop
of your virginal springs,
one grain
from your
magnanimous granaries,
fall
as the perfect moment
upon my lips,
onto the tip of my pen,
into my inkwell.
From the depths of your
dense and reverberating jungle
grant me,
at the moment it is needed,
a single birdsong, the luxury
of one bee,
one splinter
of your ancient wood perfumed
by an eternity of jasmine,
one syllable,
one tremor, one sound,
one seed:
I am of the earth and with words I sing.
Emerson, “In Praise of Books”:
“Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no cant in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestion,—the raw material of possible poems and histories.”
gaberlunzie : a poor guest who can’t pay for his entertainment
terpsichorean : related to dancing
Apparently Microsoft Word said that “charming” and “chocolate box” are synonyms. This is a thesaurus gone wild. I wonder how much computers promoted the idea of all synonyms being interchangeable.
April 25th, 2024
It’s interesting to me how the big 5 publishers have prevented all the worlds books from getting captured in Kindle, but that wasn’t able to happen with music… why?
“IMPOSTER — n. 1856 impostur deceiver or swindler; later impostor person who assume a false name or character, in Captain Smith’s The Generall Histories of Virginia (1624); developed from English, imposteur, learned borrowing from Latin impostor, from impostus, contracted from impositus, past participle of imponere place upon, impose upon, deceive; see IMPOST. —imposture n. 1537, deception or fraud…”
Makes me question the common notion of “imposter syndrome.” This is a modern phrase we use when we feel insecure or unconfident in a situation. When work feels to complex, or when we’re inadequate to step up, you wonder, “do I even belong here?”
But I don’t think this really captures the nature of the word “imposter,” which is about false character; a public persona that is weirdly, perhaps intentionally, divergent from the real character of a person. When I think of an imposter, it’s Dusty Dinkleman, from that movie Just Friends. The idea here is that he intentionally adopts a phony charismatic persona in order to advance towards some goal that he doesn’t reveal. I feel like the word implies “intentional deception” instead of “a lack of confidence.”
“Illusory form walk” (to go for a walk and see everything as a dream / to see the impermanence in everything). Never knew there was a name for this. Really started happening to me in Miami in 2008/09.
Long letters, matching angles, short thin marks hugging the top and bottom. Is there a name for this style of handwriting? Separate from fonts, are there names of styles? (Looking for styles that are more specific that serif and sans serif).
Marking a “k-” next to tasks that have kairotic potential.
I imagine psychedelics to be a reset of your internal architecture, (at least from a high dose); a tabla rasa, rebuild based on your patterns and values. In some cases, a rebuild goes well, but there are unpredictable cases, where some freak thing can corrupt a re-compile. There are many cases of this: of people who are disoriented for like 6-18 months after a trip.
My fear is it opens some un-closable portable to a waking dream world; basically, I wonder if I have some “shamanic” (schizoid) capacity that’s repressed beneath my “engineer mind.” I fear that psychedelics would thicken that signal, and then the engineer mind trying to rationalize it could get wonky. I have a family member who sees ghosts/dead people, and others will claims to pre-cognitive dreams… not claiming truth to any of that, but it’s like one side of my family has tight contact with unconscious mind.
i’ve used the phrase “unstuck from time,” which is about using the imaginal perspective to see past, present, future as one, but it was more like a motivational or aesthetic reset. T7 kairos is more about reading events, having visions, seeing opportunities, and making prophecies on how things will actually unfold.
I’m often in the artistic flow of creation, but I rarely consider leverage (how some moments are 10 or 100x). Imagine if could fuse the two? Could I have a clearer eye towards opportunity, but still be an artist in those situations instead of maximizing for some shallow end? It’s easy to do wrong when you see doors of power. I like to think in “kairotic moments,” there is first the awareness of seeing potential, but then a mode of action where you act through your own values.
What are the walking distance mysteries you’ve ignored? Would kairos help you see them? How have I never walked into the side-yard of my building? Would Huang even care? So finally, I did it. From there, I got all these weird trespassing urges. So much never crosses into the sphere of possibility for rule-following and fear. It’s worth it to see all possibilities, even if you don’t act on everything. Derive the consequences from scratch. Is this safe? Would it bother others? Is there a reward?
Record every email, every thought, every interaction, every piece of content consumed. Make a full log so you can see the nooks of your day. How can you break procrastination if you can’t see it? Everything is allowed, just write it.
April 24th, 2024
Clear topic sentences > insane paragraphs.
How would my life change if I wrote typewritten letters to the people in my life I care about?
The 2nd half of Dune shows Paul following kairos. He’s so in the moment, that he’s able to see all possible future stemming from his actions. It causes him to behave in erratic ways and accumulate power. Reminds me of that Rick and Morty episode where Morty gets the time crystals.
Feels like Udio is better at making songs that ChatGPT is writing essays. I wonder if music as better training sets because it’s less “demotic.” The % of people who can make recordings are very low, and most public recordings of music have a certain sense of polish to them. On the other hand, basically everyone is literate and can write, and so the Internet is filled with a lot of mediocre prose.
One of my Essay Architecture patterns is “fabric” which is about sentence to sentence motion. It’s the most zoomed in pattern around structure. I think there are five sub-parts to this:
CHAINS — In order to unpack an idea, you need to describe it and change your perspective on it over several sentences. This means you need to “carry” some object (ie: a noun) with you as you go. Sometimes you repeat the word, but often you want to use synonyms to add variety. With several mentions, you’re seeing the object through time. These are called “lexical chains.” A simple example might be swapping “John,” with “him.” Pronouns help (this, that, these, those), but synonyms make it richer. In addition to repetition, synonyms, and antonyms, you have “hyponyms” (zoom in to examples or subcategories) and “meronyms” (parts of the whole). This is all about creating cohesion between sentences. You can shift into new territory by carrying something already loaded in the reader’s memory.
FORM — This works in the opposite way of “chains.” If you start every sentence with “They…” it gets repetitive. You can inject novelty into the structure of your sentence: “Now that the teacher confessed she had no idea what she was doing, they…” There’s a rhythm to whether you want your sentence to open with something new, or to extend from the last sentence. Need more thinking here. But this also gets into “form.”
When does something warrant being at the beginning, middle, or end of a sentence?
When do you want parallel structure and when do you want novelty?
Old > new? General > specific? Cause > effect?
Book-ends: The beginning and ends are natural seams that transition from one idea to the other. Be strategic.
LOGIC — Certain words are key in help making connections between the objects you put on the page: “but,” “however,” “on the other hand,” “actually,” “despite,” “next,” “finally,” “furthermore,” etc. These denote the relationships between ideas. These can exist anywhere in the sentence: beginning, middle, or end. Types:
Sequence (e.g., first, next, finally);
Likeness (e.g., furthermore, moreover, in addition);
Contrast (e.g., however, nevertheless, in contrast, although);
Causality (e.g., consequently, therefore, as a result);
NOTATION — Use punctuation like colons, semi-colons, commas, dashes, em-dashes, quotes, brackets, symbols and parenthesis to give us visual cues towards meaning. They help emphasize words and interpret semantics.
Look into the automatic scoring systems they use for English classes. Why do they suck? What are their limitations?
3 scales of personal:
anecdote: in a sentence;
story: in a paragraph;
scene: multi-paragraph;
How do you decide how deep to go in a story? It depends on how relevant each beat of the story is to your thesis. A scene is really a string of connected anecdotes, and if every beat enhances the thesis, it works. Sometimes a string of quick mentions is effective … (get more specific on this.)
Folk idea:
X50403 (inverted G)
X05425 (A9/A13 … lol what?)
X32210 (Am/C in bass)
50403X (inverted D .. with a high-4?)
XX0331 (A# major) — also add a flat 5th
Came across the Fentanyl song and other songs by Jesse Welles on YouTube. Simple premise: out in nature, simple acoustic song with great lyrics. 157k views. Feels timeless. Channel already has 33k and it’s new. Surprised to find an older channel of his (of 7 years) in a different genre and only 4k subscribers.
“con-sequence” translates to “with sequence.” We see this word negatively (“there will be consequences”), but the word is about causality.
The bullet journal cult…
The bipolarity of reason:
In some senses, reason is underrated. The path to spiritual growth is somewhat tied in with … logic (you can use the “scientific method to build tentative theories about the sense that you then prove or disprove. It’s the path to true self-knowledge).
Yet, also … reason can lead to obsession and tinkering and control over things that barely matter.
There’s a kind of common reason that can turn Luciferian (unable to let go, unable to die to something mundane), and also, reason is unsuspecting razor to navigate your inner world.
It’s not about the thing itself (reason), but the application of it.
McKenna talks about how drugs have become more distilled through history. From wine to liquor, from hashish to dabs, from cocaine to heroin, from books to television. The same has happened to time. First there was “day and night,” and the precision/potency of time got more and more refined. Soon we had sun dials, then town clocks, then pocket watches, then digital time, and now atomic time (9 billion units per second).
April 23rd, 2024
An interstitial journal gives you a real ‘change log’ for debugging, and it’s format lets you observe and act from the Tao—where the energy actually is—instead of using will power to chip away at an abstract task list.
A Bach Faucet is a situation where a generative system makes an endless supply of some content at or above the quality of some culturally-valued original, but the endless supply of it makes it no longer rare, and thus less valuable
Timeless art should strive for ordered complexity. Consider Plato, or a Beatles song, or a book you can read over and over. Sure, there may be a simple high-concept, but beneath it is cascading patterns, a hyper-object that the narrow-band of human attention can’t consume at once. Complexity is timeless, because every time you revisit it, there’s something new to learn. It’s rich with layers of meaning and wonder.
“phenomenological citation” — A scientific word for a personal story. Observational and academic writers give evidence, sources, and citations to back up their thesis. But essays are unique in that the writer is a character that matters. An essay writer needs to put themselves on the page to show that their wisdom is earned. You need stories, confessions, feelings, and emotions: all these words are intimidating to an intellectual. But the phrase “phenomenological citation” gets the point across. Phenomenology is “the study on the nature of being.” Basically, what’s it like to live in your head? Your own impressions are as critical as the public domain factoids that litter our shared world. A citation of your own consciousness is a rare kind of research that only you have access to. When you fuse this with “cultural citations,” the piece is both familiar and idiosyncratic.
What if I got a grandfather clock? A ring every hour is a low-precision reminder of mine. It’s 60x less precise than a digital clock. It surprises you. It is sensorial instead of abstract.
What if I got an hour glass? It is a timer with a silent end. There is no nudge. Only when you break flow and wonder the time do you know if your interval has passed or not.
Obliques: a series of eccentric challenges and meditations.
Try writing a whole page left-handed.
We use the words “digital” and “virtual” interchangeably, but consider their roots. Within digital is “digit,” a number; a digital world is one that is composed of math instead of matter. Within virtual is “virtue,” an ideal that condones a range of possible actions. A “virtual space” then isn’t just a digital one, it’s one that’s void of pre-conditions, where ideals are baked into design constraints which determine its social fabric.
Adversarial systems are alchemical; they’re about fusing two opposite halves into a union (ie: democrats vs. republicans). But we’ve lost sight of synthesis and cooperation, and instead we’re growing cancerous mega-poles that seduce and rob identity. Individuals are melting into mega-poles instead of surfing the gradient of complexity.
Generator + governor = engine (the basics of a dynamic system).
The implication of “kairos” is becoming more clear to me. Put simply, it’s an “opportune moment.” Within a messy and chaotic battle, a good general will know that there’s a fleeting but critical moment to make a bold and risky decision. But practically, kairos is something you likely deny multiple times per day. In order to act on kairos, you need to see it. This taps into the T7 realm of consciousness, where you can intuitively grok how different decisions will play out over time. It’s almost as if we each have multiple paths in front of us that lead to unimaginable futures, but we are blind to kairos. The goal is to develop the vision to see it and the courage to act on it.
When creating scripts, make sure to always build in checks to help with error debugging. Could be worth building a personal “Scripting GPT” so that best practices are always baked in.
In 45 minutes, I was able to use AI to help me write a script to convert my monthly log pages into a CSV. Each log is now a row, and it includes the date and time (while stripping the time from the log). As long as you have a raw stream of data that is semi-consistently formatted, you can use code to melt and reform it into whatever form you need.
The excess of desserts at parties is a symbol of over-politeness. The fear of rudeness by not bringing something means there are high-fat leftovers that throw off nutrition goals for a week.
Set your alarm clock to a classical music radio station.
New exercise: as you’re washing the dishes by hand, keep a mental list of the thoughts that emerged. How long can you expand your list before you start forgetting things? I can hold 6-7 ideas before I start blacking out some of the earlier points. I’m hoping this grows with time. This is a parallel process, you have to 1) be open to new thoughts, while 2) retaining past thoughts.
There’s power in fusing notes and tasks into one list, and then using symbols to delineate between the two. I intuitively worked out some format this morning, and it’s basically a bullet journal / interstitial journal.
There’s something “fresh” about having a full record of the day; it changes the nature of tasks. When something pops in your head (some responsibility), you just put it down at the bottom of the list. If it duplicates something above, you can cross it out above. A bullet journal shows what’s live and bubbling in your actual subconscious. An external task list that’s organized by priority is abstract and requires will power to get into.
It’s the battle between subconscious priority and abstract priority.
(EOD note: I entered around 85 bullets today, and 13 of them were pushed to logs.)
For pleonasm, (“black darkness”) a modern editor would say to cut “black” because it’s already covered in darkness. There’s a bias to reduce redundancies, but it’s not an absolute rule. There can be power in duplicity.
I like the idea of using specific literary forms (ie: parataxis) to tie 2 events together in a theme. Using the form on it’s own is (potentially) meaningless, but if you use the same syntax in two intentional places, it creates a semantic relationship that could be very interesting.
The fractured mind wants endless bits and it strips you of your executive function. Protect the reserves of intent.
I wonder how much “morning stillness” will effect your day. As in, if you wake up and constantly jump into your thoughts, notifications, and distractions, does that scatter-upon-waking effect just kill your force for the day? And if you instead watch your thoughts, let them pass, set intentions, and log, log, log, will the day be better?
April 22nd, 2024
A Channel 5 character study on the Kia boys.
lenticular - a surface with concave, linear, perforations. It means that if you look at the plane from the left or the right, you might see different colors, patterns, or images. (loosely relates to the Nicholas Cage AI illusions).
The 7 Tiers of consciousness in Dune:
Level 1s (the worms)
Level 2s (tribe dynamics)
Level 3s (fundamentalists in the south)
Level 4s (all about Dust extraction/politics; call T5 the rats)
Level 5s (against typical order, anti-voodoo, anti-power, one with the T1 Earth)
Level 6s (Dust: visions, partial flashes of the future)
Level 7s (post-worm trip, see all possible futures & their outcomes)
Throughout the movie, there’s a theme of Paul climbing levels (from 4>7), and as he does so, he realizes he needs to regress to previous one. By joining the desert tribe (from 4>5) he realizes the need to go back T1 (to be one with the desert). As his visions of the future arrive (T6), he initiates and gets accepted within the tribe (T2). After his post-worm poison ordeal, he realizes he needs to go rally the fundamentalists (T3), and by the end of the movie, he’s on a quest to conquer the galaxy (T4).
Where a typical T4 (the Arkanans) are obsessed with Dust extraction, Paul’s new quest for power is informed by experiencing all tiers.
It’s odd to me how the en-dash is left out in some text editors. One dash (-) is a hyphen, two dashes (–) is an en-dash, and three dashes (—) is an em-dash. You would think that by hitting the - symbol multiple times, you can get the dash you’re looking for. Substack (and other editors) give you an em-dash with only 2 clicks, and 3 clicks gives you a full-line divider.
It’s almost like they have the power to remove the en-dash from existence. Sure, you can still hit Cmd + ‘-’ to get an en-dash, but it’s much easier to just ignore the distinction between the hyphen and en-dash. Sure, you can go to a usage book and find reasons on when to use each, but what’s the actual point? The role of punctuation is to create visual cues to help you interpret meaning, but is the absence of proper dash logic actually prohibitive to anyone other than a snoot?
Both of my typewriters only have a single dash. You can click them multiple times (ie: 3 clicks to get an em-dash), and it appears like 3 distinct lines (instead of a long one). It looks silly, so I just use a hyphen instead of an em-dash (woah!) It’s completely legible. Typewriter almost dash reductivism.
Vervaeke clip on Tim Ferris: The church, the temple, and the mosque used to be places where an “ecology of practices” had a home. It was less about socializing, or communicating, but communing. People would mutually conform to set of rituals and words that would transform themselves, enhancing religio, sacredness, and an awareness of the depths of self, other, and reality. Now it’s up for you to cultivate a “living ecology of practices” and form or join communities that stretch you and sharpen your “virtual” (from: virtue) engine.
Imagine a Substack that rewrote Michel Montaigne’s essays but for the modern times. It would change the Old English voice to a Tim Urban voice, and translate the topics to be relatable today. Sounds fun, sounds extremely time-consuming. We’re probably getting to a point with AI where all schemes can be realized.
April 21st, 2024
Are there any essays about the use of symbolism in animated movie production intros? What’s with the lion, the lighthouse, and the logo in the clouds?
Dune 2 is the first movie I’ve seen in theaters since the Vision Pro.
Our society has a love/hate relationship with quantification. The consensus is that we’ve OD’d on numbers and need to step back into a more intuitive state. I certainly feel that and find value in it too, but I’m still a number-head.
Instead of birthday candles, you should light and blow out 18” tall table candles. It prevents cake spit. But also, imagine giving somebody a numbered candle every year? Each birthday, you’d light your new candle, plus all your candles from years past. Past 10 years old, the idea of matching the number of candles to your actual age starts to become absurd, but something’s different if the candles are relics from your past. The set of candles would descend in height from present to past. There’s something powerful at the image of decade-old melting yellow Roman candles as a symbol for aging.
April 20th, 2024
Found out that my late grandfather had an old typewriter but it was thrown out. It totally makes sense that after computers became mainstream (say, 2000), there was no conceivable future where a typewriter would ever be useful. (Yet, I spent $647 of my $650 in birthday money on a 84-year old typewriter in 2024). The utility of a typewriter in this day and age is still surprising. My one-liner explanation is: “since you can’t delete anything, it helps you practice writing good first drafts.”
April 19th, 2024
Each 17-year phase is an extraordinary amount of time:
0-16 years old : childhood (I)
17-33 years old : early adulthood (II)
34-50 years old : middle adulthood (III)
51-68 years old : late adulthood (IV)
69-85 years old : elderhood (V)
“The other kind of growth.” This is a title idea for an essay or book on the challenge of a Kunstlerroman (a story about a developing artist) within the high-pressure and incentive-warped landscape of the Internet. This came after reading a few pages on “The Death of the Artist” (or something like that) which featured an honest interview with Austin Kleon.
But the premise will be on how the Creator Economy is about the primary pursuit of audience growth and financial growth, but there is an artistic, intellectual, and spiritual growth which takes precedence over all of that.
I got my 2nd typewriter! A “Royal Arrow” from 1940. Story here.
I won’t name names, but I’m getting impatient with a certain publications take on new technology. The writing is quite good, but it’s like a tricksy rhetorical attack to get us to love something we shouldn’t. There’s a difference between blind techno-optimism and “critical techno-optimism.” A hard critique of technology from someone who loves it is maybe the most important thing we need now.
Access the root of your mind where you can tinker with the source code. This is an exciting and primal place to be. It’s easy to feel like you receive your own thoughts, but the real glowing moments of the day are when you’re you switch from reading thoughts to writing thoughts (from read-mode to write-mode). After you forge a new thought, you write it, and realize, wow, now that I’ve captured this insight, I can potentially read it over and over until it’s etched into the grooves of my mind, and my future thoughts will radiate from this new discovery. In this sense, logs are hopeful. A good logs is regenerative in that it pulls you out of whatever funk you’re in.
Has the invention of the text message corroded our culture? I remember when texting first came out, and there was ambiguity on when to do which. Texting is the most flexible and the least confrontational, and so we default to that and no one makes casual phone calls anymore.
Imagine if texting were only an option after a missed call? You made the effort to talk, and now you get to leave an audio note or a text note.
Don’t consume media from someone you don’t have a direct line of communication with.
Joke idea: I’m nervous to try mushrooms and have a bad trip, so I thought maybe I should try them on my birthday, the happiest day of the year, but then I realize it’s also the one day every year where everyone in my life calls me to talk for 3 minutes, which is lovely on a normal day, but difficult on three dried grams when you can’t form words.
How does the good, the true, and the beautiful tie into essay writing?
I think Essay Architecture covers the beautiful. It’s the vessel to shape something so it’s engaging, balanced, and full. Truth is writing about topics that are real and honest and unique to you, while the good is about arriving at an idea that condones harmony and advances the species.
So to summarize: beauty is the vessel, truth is personal intuition, and goodness is around morality.
Essay Architecture covers a “completeness of components,” but subject matter is covered in a personal truth and collective good.
WIP definitions:
Aganippe : In Greek legend, a fountain of Boetia at the foot of Mount Helicon, dedicated to the MUSES because it imparted poetic inspiration. Hence the Muses are sometimes called Aganippides. Also the NYMPH of this fountain.
ages: Hesiod (8th century BC): golden, silver, brazen, heroic, iron (also planets) — Shakespeare's 7 ages in As You Like It.
Aglaonice : the Thessalian who could calculate eclipses, "Yes, the Moon obeys Aglaonice.”
agony column : a column in the newspaper containing advertistements of missing relatives and friends.
Aladdin's lamp
Aladdin's window : to attempt to complete something begun by a master hand, genius, or supernatural force.
The Alamo : as the THERMOPYLE of America; like in 300; 187 men led by Davy Crockett vs. 3,000 Mexicans.
Alastor : avenging evil spirit who visits the sins of the father on their children; Shelly poem, "the spirit of solitude"...
albatross: big bird; cape sheep by sailors; sleeps in the air without any apparent motion of its wings, to shoot one is fatal; see Ancient Mariner.
alchemy : al = Arabic, kimia to Greek chemeia, "Egyptian art" or "the art of the Egyptians" - transmutation of base metals into gold and the search for the philosopher's stone, the universal solvent, or ALKAHEST, the PANACEA, and the ELIXIR OF LIFE
ale (see types of beers).
alectryomancy : Divination by a cock (chicken). Draw a circle, and write in succession round it the letters of the alphabet, on each of which lay a grain of corn. Then put a cock in the centre of the circle, and watch what grains it eats. The letters will prognosticate the answer; Libanus and Jamblicus thus discovered who was to succeed the emperor Valens. The Cock ate the grains over the letter t, h, e, o, d = Theod(odus).
Alexandria : destroyed in 640 A.D. Look up Euclid.
St. Alexis : patron saints of hermits and beggars.
alfar : the elves of northern mythology; in German legend, the dockalfar frequent dark underground caverns and mines. The O.E. Aelfric means "ruler of the elves."
All Fool's Day : April Fool’s
All Hallow's Eve : (also: Nutcrack Night, Holy Eve) A holiday for apple bobbing, nut-cracking, finding one's lover by various rituals; if born on Halloween had gift of 2nd sight; Scottish.
indian summer : All Hallows Summer, St. Luke's Summer; dry hot haze in late autumn
Allah
alligator : Mississippi River keel-boat sailor.
quince : A Midsummer Night's Dream
Coleridge : look up Ancient Mariner
AMPHIGOURI : (excessive alliteration?) VERSE WHICH SOUND WELL BUT HAVE NO MEANING … Henry Harder, 100 lines in Latin hexagram …On cats, each word beginning with a C … Can Cum Catis certamen carmine compositum current calm C Catulli Canine. … See alliteration types in book of Myths (for rhyme section)
almanac : a Medieval Latin word of obscure origin for a calendar of days and months with astronomical data.
April 18th, 2024
Israel strikes Iran. A compulsion to doom scroll, but watching myself as I do it. There’s worry, but also a scanning for both clarity and novelty. The main problem is that the same factoids are being repeated over and over; it’s quite hard to obtain new and developing information. What’s happened in the last 30 minutes? It’s a weird paradox; you obviously don’t want bad things to happen, but the medium breeds an excessive searching where the main resolve is the discovery in something new and horrible.
Pre-birthday night. The decorations, the streamer with letters on string over mirror. Festivus! Company on Saturday. Have I earned the right to relax tomorrow? I’ve been feeling endlessly behind.
Substack comment on the synergy in fast & slow writing:
I definitely lean towards the side of editing, restructuring, and rewriting, but I recently started a typewriter practice where I soft-publish a few one-take, one-page essays per week. I've been surprised by the legibility of those drafts. Getting tempted to move into a faster pace, while also having a long-form essay slow cooking over a few months.
“Beauty is surprise that can be integrated.”
Notes from
’s podcast on pseudonyms.1) Before her audience, she wrote a blog for 9 years and had an audience. Sometimes the freedom to write is worth sacrificing an audience that traps you in an old and rigid self. ...
2) Choose names that are pronounceable, spellable, and memorable! I dropped my long, Greek last name because you didn’t wouldn’t know what to say if you saw it. I think there’s value in keeping your first name for when real-life and online-life collide. (If you didn’t know, Dean is my middle name.) …
3) A pseudonym doesn’t necessarily make writing stress free. You grow into your new name and stakes develop. The main benefit is being undetectable to Google and from others in your life who might not appreciate the creative risks your taking. Of course, there’s value to being headstrong, but learning to write and express is hard enough that you don’t want decade-long identity games to stunt your progress. I’m less concerned about online friends finding out my last name than my pseudonym leaking to my real life. …
4) Think of a pseudonyms like a temporary cover to grow into yourself as a writer. At some point, you have enough momentum, roots, and confidence that it doesn’t matter who’s watching. (There are exceptions for unique situations and topics where a lifetime disguise might make sense.)
AI is still in the robot voice phase. Even when you ask it to do impressions, it comes up with these weird, dramatic caricatures. Unfortunately I think this is temporarily and AI could become the ultimate imitation machine.
In terms of "AI making you more you," my hope has always been to have something like this. Basically, if I have a million words of personally written logs/journal entries, then AI would be pretty good at surfacing them. There's still power in an on-the-natch and unpredictable subconscious (remembering things yourself) but I wonder if AI can help connect the dots of your past (assuming your past is digitized).
Most of these new AI writing tools have a business slant and a "silver bullet" vibe ("hey, if you hate writing, click this button and the thing comes out!"), but I hope there's a world where writers who love writing can find some use among the hoopla.
For a less professional GPT experience, you might have some fun with "procedural chaos" using GPT. For example, you can say, "hey, take this sentence, but for everyone word, use the next word in the dictionary." It can apply stupid little rules at scale, creating a dream-like effect that creates some funny accidents worth keeping.
April 17th, 2024
Surprised the Terence McKenna admitted that Food of the Gods (which introduced the “Stoned Ape Theory”) was consciously a work of propaganda. This doesn’t mean he didn’t believe the theory, it just confirms that the main intention of the work was to change public opinion on drugs:
“Since I feel pretty much around friends and fringies here, it doesn’t trouble me to confess … FOOD OF THE GODS, I conceived of as an intellectual Trojan horse. Written as though it were a scientific study, citations to impossible-to-find books and so forth … simply to ‘assuage’ academic anthropologists. THE IDEA IS – to leave this thing on their doorstep; rather like an abandoned baby, or Trojan horse” (SOURCE)
“I felt if I could change the frame of the argument and get drugs insinuated into a scenario of human origins, then I would cast doubt on the whole paradigm of Western Civilization, in the same way that realizing that we came from monkeys did a great deal to re-set the dials in the 19th Century Victorian mind. If you could convince people that drugs were responsible for the emergence of large brain size and language, then you could completely re-cast the argument from: "Drugs are alien, invasive and distorting to human nature" to: "Drugs are natural, ancient and responsible for human nature." So it was consciously propaganda, although I believe all that and I believe it's going to be hard to knock down.
The target audience will be the converted first of all, but my hope is that the engines of public relations and publicity will move it much more into the mainstream. The 18-25 year old group that is drug-friendly but has no rationale except that it's a good time. This book is what I want every co-ed next Fall to be carrying to Anthro 101 to beard the professor with. You've heard me talk about meme wars, and how, if we could have a level playing field, these ideas would do very well. The theory I'm putting forth—to disprove it you would have to get your feet wet and get stoned. Anybody who doesn't want to do that should rule themselves off the case. So that presents academic types with a real problem.
Perhaps the weirdest research rabbit hole of my year: analyzing the shit of different African animals that existed at he time of Homo Habilis (1-3 million years ago). I’m doing a critique of the “Stoned Ape Theory.” Basically, psilocybin grows in the dung of large herbivores. Their shit has high moisture content (+80%) and is nutrient rich (because of the plant matter they eat). As the poo decomposes it creates heat, creating a wet, rich, hot microclimate for fungus to grow in.
The question then is, which animal’s shit was most likely in the path of early hominids? Hippopotamus shit is perfect for psychedelics, but they mostly poo underwater. Elephant shit too, but stalking and hunting a massive mammal is a lot of work. Horses, rabbits, pigs … they’re huntable, but not as populated across the African grasslands. The ancient cattle (water buffalo, wildebeests, antelope, other cow-looking things) were in the right place, in the right quantity, and had magic poo.
The conditions all make sense, but McKenna’s evolutionary mechanism is the real problem with the theory.
From The Book of Symbols, in the entry under STAR:
"Alchemists called the imagination a ... super-celestial star because of its ability to shed light on, transform, and transcend the fetters of existence. Paracelsus used the term for the numinous "light of nature," which he believed was innate uniquely in each of us (and also in animals) as inborn spirits. Only self-knowledge, he believed, can teach us of this "quintessence," and the learning is unconventional, engaging intuition, feeling, fantasy, and dreams: 'As the light of nature cannot speak, it buildeth shapes in sleep.' These [shapes], too, are like stars, reflections of eternity in the dark pool of our being."
There are two halves to “immortality” a selfish desire for an eternal reputation, but a selfless and non-desperate comfort in knowing the effect you have beyond your own time.
Quick pitch for Essay Architecture: Before I was a writer/editor, I was an architect. While that field has really strong books that teach the entirety of the craft, writing advice is scattered (also, too general / too specific). This makes it hard to improve at essay writing. A visual map of the craft makes it easier to grasp, and measurable patterns lets AI score your drafts and create custom learning paths.
The thesaurus sucks. You can always tell when a writer is using a thesaurus and random words are substituted to sound smart. The problem is the thesaurus has a bad architecture. It's flat. Everything connects to everything (the original sin), and it treats every synonym as equal (they're not!). Since we don't have a hierarchy of "core words" and "synonyms," it makes it extremely hard for kids and adults to expand their vocabulary. I believe a better thesaurus architecture can expand a native speaker's vocabulary by 2x (from 20-40k words). It requires us to determine "root pairs of language" (happy/sad), and then define how each synonym is slightly different. Our language is our lens to reality, and we underestimate how vocabulary can sharpen our writing, our relationships, and our capacity for self-transcendence.
David Whyte’s “Consolations” is something like a poetic thesaurus.
"I worship at the alter of intention and obstacle."
— Aaron Sorkin
I’m thinking to start a practice where I just write out responses to what I read on Substack in my logs. There’s no pressure to comment, or share, or advertise it or whatever. It’s just a semi-public, mostly unnoticed thought process to remember what I read and what I think when I read it. Maybe some of it pushes to Notes too… idk, well see.
- ) — wow, what a story. The whole premise almost seems to good to be real (I have no context to how ask Polly works, but it doesn’t matter because the explanation is even better than the setup. The killing of the bird is a microcosm (and the lack of communication or empathy around it) is a microcosm into relationship. I wonder if the bird-killer will read this story, and if so, how he would respond (and if so, if we would write his response).
- ) — What comes up with the launch of notes is the baseball game I went to at CitiField on the week it came out. It had a beginning-of-spring aura, which is naturally the time to introduce something.
You don’t need everyone to like you (
) — One of my favorite ways I’ve seen someone revisit an old essay. It’s a 6 year old post with present-day Alex injecting in bold. No editing, just adding. It wouldn’t be as interesting if it were only a month apart, but in 6 years you see the change in life, perspective, voice. Feels like he’s a time-traveler.
The Murukami quote was great too:“A lot of customers came to the club. If one out of ten enjoyed the place and decided to come again, that was enough. If one out of ten was a repeat customer, then the business would survive. To put it another way, it didn’t matter if nine out of ten people didn’t like the club. Realizing this lifted a weight off my shoulders. Still, I had to make sure that the one person who did like the place really liked it. In order to do that, I had to make my philosophy absolutely clear, and patiently maintain that philosophy no matter what. This is what I learned from running a business.”
April 16th, 2024
My book on hermeticism is showing me the psychological potential of meals. Of course food is functional, delightful, and a good break, but it also acts as a reliable threshold in your day that you can use for symbolic priming. The method is “alchemical” instead of scientific. It’s anti-Huberman in that it’s not about specific bio-sounding enzymes. It’s about “impregnating” your meal with a thought and focusing on it before the bite, during the bite, after the bite, and for each bite. It’s something like a programmable eating mantra.
What can I learn from journalism? What if half of my process became structured and deadline focused? I very much appreciated the “work like an artist” workflow I have, and will fight to keep it, but maybe that’s one of two streams.
I can write short relatively fast. I can write a solid 500-word one-take essay in an hour. In 2 hours I can edit, refine, and publish. I can muster 4 hours a week to write two, short, topical, Substack-native essays. The problem is my executive focus. I haven’t been prioritizing the practical half of my writing practice.
We Earthlings do weird things to celebrate holidays. For Christmas we cut down all the evergreen trees. For Thanksgiving we genocide the turkeys. For Easter we take perfectly fine eggs and crack them against each other in competitive brackets. I just don't understand; on Earth Day why don’t we burn garbage in back yards and dump poison in the rivers?
For a thesis to feel supported it needs material, the fusion of biographical details and cultural lore. These two modes are opposites: private memories vs. public domain. (The public/private element is common in architecture.)
By supporting your thesis with biographical details, you:
lodge yourself in the essay, making it something only you can write,
prove that you have first-hand experience with the topic, and
model how the reader might relate to the thesis.
By supporting your thesis with cultural lore, you:
show that a pattern exists beyond yourself,
are trusted as someone who is knowledge in relevant fields, and
make your case with symbols the reader might already be familiar with.
An essay missing a half is lob-sided. Without biographical details, it’s missing a personal element, without cultural lore it’s missing an collective element.
April 15th, 2024
Check out the English Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). It is set of one billion words that is considered to be the best cross-section of usage in the English language. It has 8 domains—blogs, websites, movies, speeches, fiction, magazines, newspapers, academi research—that each cover ~125 million words. Bigger corpus’s do exist—the site has a 155 billion word corpus of all Google books—but they’re less balanced and representative of the language.
Basically, you type in a word, and it tells you how many entries there are, and shows you every example so you can see it in context. While some of these corpuses show it as “0.14 per million words,” these stats below are absolutes.
Here’s how many times each word was used in a one billion word corpus:
496,838 entries for “love.”
20,985 entres for “tournament.”
1,163 entries for “squint.”
256 entries for “faustian.”
38 entries for “addle.”
13 entries for “abaddon.”
0 entries for “abdals.”
lemma (n.) : a family of words that all share the same words (ie: develop = development, developing, developmental, underdeveloped, redevelop, etc.)
This is the best vocabulary test I found (of the three I tried):
https://preply.com/en/learn/english/test-your-vocab
What to expect: first, they give you a grid of 50 words, ranging from really easy to really hard. I knew probably 90% of these. But then based on what you select, it gives you a second group of words that’s at the edge of your zone, where I only knew 20%.
I ended up getting an estimate of 22,986 known words. On their visual scale, I was on the highest mark (“proficient,” I think), but within native speakers I was on the lower end (native speakers range from 20,000 - 35,000 words).
My goal is to hit 40,000 words. Vocabulary ties directly to voice. I think there’s a way to command specific words that can use context clues to help them become rich and inclusive instead of pretentious.
If I can retain 25 new words a day (my daily session usually brings 50 new ones), I can reach 40,000 words by the end of 2025.
I took three vocabulary tests, marked down the words I missed, and used AI to define them for me. There’s a certain appeal to charting words that are simply “unknown,” but just because its uncommon, doesn’t mean it’s worth using. For now, I think my public dictionary might just include more than necessary: it’s a reflection of my learning process. Maybe I’ll eventually publish a pruned list of words that I think are worth learning and integrating.
Anyway, here’s my list of unknown words (while I have an intuitive sense of some of these, I either questioned it’s specific meaning outside of cliche usage, or, I don’t feel confident enough to use it in a sentence):
Abscond: To leave secretly and suddenly, often to avoid capture or responsibility. Distinct from "flee" in its connotation of wrongdoing.
Alleged: Claimed but not proven. Distinct from "supposed" in its legal context.
Alum: A chemical compound used in various applications. Distinct from "alumnus" (a graduate of a school).
Aperitif: An alcoholic drink served before a meal to stimulate the appetite. Distinct from "appetizer" (a small dish served before a meal).
Atoll: A ring-shaped coral reef enclosing a lagoon. Distinct from "island" in its specific formation.
Augured: Predicted or foreshadowed. Distinct from "predicted" in its association with divination.
Basis: The foundation or underlying principle. Distinct from "base" in its conceptual nature.
Bawdy: Humorously indecent or obscene. Distinct from "lewd" in its humorous tone.
Bibulous: Excessively fond of drinking alcohol. Distinct from "alcoholic" in its emphasis on enjoyment rather than addiction.
Bloc: A group of countries or political parties with common interests. Distinct from "block" (a solid piece of material).
Bludgeon: A heavy, blunt weapon used for striking. Distinct from "club" in its intended use for violence.
Braggadocio: Boastful or arrogant behavior. Distinct from "bravado" in its negative connotation.
Brobdingnagian: Gigantic or enormous. Distinct from "huge" in its literary origin (from "Gulliver's Travels").
Bruit: To spread a rumor or report widely. Distinct from "rumor" as a verb rather than a noun.
Bugbear: A source of fear or annoyance. Distinct from "pest" in its imaginary or exaggerated nature.
Cabaret: A nightclub with live entertainment. Distinct from "club" in its emphasis on performance.
Cantle: The raised, curved part at the back of a saddle. Distinct from "pommel" (the front part of a saddle).
Caitiff: A cowardly or despicable person. Distinct from "villain" in its connotation of weakness rather than evil.
Captious: Excessively critical or prone to finding fault. Distinct from "critical" in its negativity and triviality.
Cavalier: Arrogantly dismissive or offhand. Distinct from "dismissive" in its historical association with royalist soldiers.
Cenacle: A small, exclusive group of people with shared interests. Distinct from "clique" in its intellectual or artistic focus.
Chivvy: To harass or nag someone repeatedly. Distinct from "nag" in its connotation of physical pursuit.
Chthonic: Related to the underworld or subterranean deities. Distinct from "underground" in its mythological context.
Clerisy: The intellectual or educated class. Distinct from "intelligentsia" in its religious origin.
Communiqué: An official announcement or statement. Distinct from "statement" in its diplomatic or military context.
Cordillera: A system of parallel mountain ranges. Distinct from "mountain range" in its large scale and geological formation.
Coven: A group or gathering of witches. Distinct from "group" in its specific association with witchcraft.
Defenestrate: To throw someone out of a window. Distinct from "eject" in its specific method and historical origin.
Deracinate: To uproot or remove from a native environment. Distinct from "displace" in its connotation of cultural or social uprooting.
Devious: Deceiving or cunning. Distinct from "dishonest" in its connotation of cleverness and indirectness.
Disjunctive: Lacking connection or coherence. Distinct from "disconnected" in its logical or grammatical context.
Ejector: A device that forces something out. Distinct from "expeller" in its mechanical nature.
Embonpoint: A plump or stout physique. Distinct from "fat" in its positive or neutral connotation.
Emir: A high-ranking Arab ruler or prince. Distinct from "sheikh" in its political rather than religious authority.
Endoplasmic: Related to the internal membrane system of a cell. Distinct from "intracellular" in its specific reference to the endoplasmic reticulum.
Epigone: An inferior imitator or follower. Distinct from "imitator" in its connotation of lesser talent or originality.
Erythrocyte: A red blood cell. Distinct from "blood cell" in its specific type and function.
Estivation: A state of dormancy or inactivity during summer. Distinct from "hibernation" (winter dormancy).
Exudative: Relating to the discharge of fluid from blood vessels or skin lesions. Distinct from "oozing" in its medical context.
Fens: Lowland areas partially covered by water. Distinct from "marshes" in their nutrient-rich soil and vegetation.
Figure: A number or value expressed in digits. Distinct from "number" in its emphasis on the written or printed form.
Fuliginous: Sooty or dusky in color. Distinct from "dark" in its specific shade and texture.
Funambulist: A tightrope walker. Distinct from "acrobat" in its specific skill.
Fustilugs: A fat, clumsy person. Distinct from "oaf" in its emphasis on physical appearance.
Gauche: Lacking social grace or sophistication. Distinct from "awkward" in its connotation of social ineptitude.
Glutamate: An amino acid that functions as a neurotransmitter. Distinct from "amino acid" in its specific role in the nervous system.
Grouse: To complain or grumble. Distinct from "complain" in its connotation of petty or repeated grievances.
Hallmark: A distinguishing feature or characteristic. Distinct from "trademark" in its figurative rather than legal sense.
Hessian: A coarse fabric made from jute or hemp. Distinct from "burlap" in its specific material and weave.
Horologium: A timepiece or clock. Distinct from "clock" in its inclusion of sundials and other time-measuring devices.
Hutch: A cage or coop for small animals. Distinct from "cage" in its typical use for rabbits or other small mammals.
Hypnopompic: Relating to the state immediately before waking up. Distinct from "hypnagogic" (relating to the state before falling asleep).
Ignivomous: Vomiting fire or lava. Distinct from "volcanic" in its specific action.
Impolitic: Unwise or imprudent. Distinct from "unwise" in its emphasis on political or social consequences.
Inveigle: To persuade or deceive someone with flattery or charm. Distinct from "persuade" in its connotation of trickery.
Lectern: A stand with a slanted top used to hold a book or notes for reading. Distinct from "podium" (a raised platform for speakers).
Legerdemain: Skillful use of one's hands to deceive or manipulate. Distinct from "sleight of hand" in its broader application beyond magic tricks.
Leitmotif: A recurring musical theme associated with a particular person, place, or idea. Distinct from "theme" in its specific use in musical composition.
Limerence: A state of intense romantic infatuation. Distinct from "infatuation" in its psychological depth and longevity.
Limpid: Clear and transparent. Distinct from "clear" in its connotation of purity and serenity.
Lothario: A man who seduces women. Distinct from "womanizer" in its literary origin and connotation of charm and sophistication.
Lugubrious: Mournful or gloomy. Distinct from "sad" in its exaggerated or affected nature.
Maganam: A ruse or deception. Distinct from "trick" in its elaborate or strategic nature.
Malapropism: The mistaken use of a word in place of a similar-sounding one. Distinct from "error" in its humorous or ironic effect.
Onious: Relating to onions. Distinct from "oniony" in its technical or scientific context.
Maladroit: Clumsy or inept. Distinct from "clumsy" in its connotation of social or diplomatic blunders.
Mammon: Wealth or greed personified. Distinct from "money" in its negative moral connotation.
Manacle: A shackle or handcuff. Distinct from "handcuff" in its historical use and connotation of captivity.
Mawkish: Excessively sentimental or insincere. Distinct from "sentimental" in its negative connotation.
Melange: A mixture or medley. Distinct from "mixture" in its connotation of variety and diversity.
Mien: A person's appearance or manner. Distinct from "appearance" in its inclusion of facial expression and demeanor.
Mumpsimus: A traditional custom or notion adhered to despite being shown to be unreasonable. Distinct from "superstition" in its stubbornness and resistance to change.
Nescience: Lack of knowledge or ignorance. Distinct from "ignorance" in its philosophical or theological context.
Noisome: Harmful or unwholesome. Distinct from "unpleasant" in its connotation of physical or moral danger.
Nostrum: A medicine of secret composition and unverified effectiveness. Distinct from "medicine" in its dubious or fraudulent nature.
Oneiromancy: Divination through the interpretation of dreams. Distinct from "dream interpretation" in its supernatural or occult context.
Opsimath: A person who begins to learn or study late in life. Distinct from "late bloomer" in its specific focus on learning.
Pabulum: Material that is intellectual but oversimplified or bland. Distinct from "food" in its figurative sense of mental nourishment.
Parsimonious: Excessively frugal or stingy. Distinct from "frugal" in its negative connotation.
Pastiche: An artistic work that imitates the style of previous works. Distinct from "imitation" in its deliberate and stylistic nature.
Peasantry: The class of small farmers or laborers. Distinct from "farmers" in its historical and social context.
Perdue: Hidden or concealed. Distinct from "hidden" in its military or strategic context.
Piedmontese: Relating to the Piedmont region of Italy. Distinct from "Italian" in its specific regional origin.
Pittance: A small or inadequate amount of money. Distinct from "amount" in its connotation of insufficiency or meagerness.
Phytic: Relating to a type of acid found in plants. Distinct from "plant-based" in its specific chemical compound.
Potboiler: A work of art or literature created quickly for financial gain. Distinct from "bestseller" in its emphasis on speed and commercial motive.
Pother: A commotion or fuss. Distinct from "commotion" in its connotation of annoyance or bother.
Premier: First or foremost in importance or rank. Distinct from "first" in its connotation of prominence or leadership.
Prig: A self-righteously moralistic person. Distinct from "prude" in its emphasis on moral superiority rather than sexual propriety.
Prurient: Excessively interested in sexual matters. Distinct from "lewd" in its connotation of unhealthy or inappropriate desire.
Puckish: Mischievous or impish. Distinct from "playful" in its connotation of trickery or devilishness.
Pule: To whine or complain in a childish manner. Distinct from "whine" in its connotation of weakness or immaturity.
Purloin: To steal or pilfer. Distinct from "steal" in its connotation of stealth or cleverness.
Ramient: Branched or having many branches. Distinct from "branched" in its technical or scientific context.
Redolent: Strongly reminiscent or suggestive of something. Distinct from "reminiscent" in its olfactory or sensory connotation.
Refectory: A room used for communal meals in a monastery or other institution. Distinct from "dining hall" in its religious or institutional context.
Regent: A person who governs in place of a monarch. Distinct from "ruler" in its temporary or delegated nature.
Regnant: Reigning or ruling. Distinct from "dominant" in its official or legal authority.
Rind: The tough outer skin of certain fruits or cheeses. Distinct from "peel" in its thickness and texture.
Roving: Wandering or traveling from place to place. Distinct from "wandering" in its connotation of purposefulness or exploration.
Ruck: A mass of people or things. Distinct from "crowd" in its connotation of disorderliness or confusion.
Seamy: Sordid or disreputable. Distinct from "disreputable" in its connotation of hidden or underworld activities.
Sedulous: Diligent or persistent. Distinct from "diligent" in its connotation of painstaking attention to detail.
Shakti: The female creative power or cosmic energy in Hinduism. Distinct from "energy" in its spiritual and feminine context.
Shearling: A sheepskin or lambskin with the wool still attached. Distinct from "sheepskin" in its use as a garment or lining.
Sheerly: Completely or absolutely. Distinct from "completely" in its connotation of transparency or thinness.
Shuddered: Trembled or quivered, often with fear or revulsion. Distinct from "trembled" in its connotation of horror or disgust.
Signet: A small seal used to sign documents or mark property. Distinct from "seal" in its personal or official nature.
Sobriquet: A nickname or epithet. Distinct from "nickname" in its literary or historical context.
Soliloquy: A dramatic device in which a character speaks their thoughts aloud while alone on stage. Distinct from "monologue" in its introspective and revealing nature.
Sparge: To sprinkle or spray with liquid. Distinct from "sprinkle" in its technical or industrial context, often related to brewing.
Strop: A strip of leather or canvas used to sharpen razors. Distinct from "sharpen" in its specific tool and purpose.
Sully: To soil or tarnish. Distinct from "soil" in its connotation of moral or reputational damage.
Sultry: Hot and humid, often with sensual or seductive overtones. Distinct from "hot" in its atmospheric and emotional connotations.
Svelte: Slender and elegant. Distinct from "slim" in its connotation of grace and sophistication.
Tatterdemalion: A person dressed in ragged or tattered clothing. Distinct from "ragamuffin" in its emphasis on the clothing rather than the person.
Tawdry: Cheap and gaudy. Distinct from "tacky" in its historical association with lace and finery.
Tenebrous: Dark and gloomy. Distinct from "dark" in its connotation of mystery or foreboding.
Terpsichorean: Relating to dancing. Distinct from "choreographic" in its poetic or literary tone.
Tricorn: A hat with a brim turned up on three sides. Distinct from "hat" in its specific style and historical context.
Trill: A rapid alternation between two adjacent musical notes. Distinct from "vibrato" in its use of distinct pitches rather than variations in pitch.
Trollop: A sexually promiscuous woman. Distinct from "slut" in its connotation of untidiness or coarseness.
Trundle: To roll or move on wheels. Distinct from "roll" in its connotation of heaviness or clumsiness.
Tureen: A deep, covered dish used for serving soup or stew. Distinct from "bowl" in its size and formality.
Uxoricide: The murder of one's wife. Distinct from "homicide" in its specific victim and perpetrator.
Valetudinarian: A person who is unduly anxious about their health. Distinct from "hypochondriac" in its connotation of weakness or self-indulgence.
Verdure: Lush, green vegetation. Distinct from "greenery" in its poetic or literary tone.
Vibrissae: The stiff, sensory hairs found in the nostrils or around the mouths of certain mammals. Distinct from "whiskers" in its technical or scientific context.
Visage: A person's face or facial expression. Distinct from "face" in its connotation of character or appearance.
Weir: A low dam built across a river to raise the water level or divert its flow. Distinct from "dam" in its specific structure and purpose.
Welter: A confused or disorderly mass. Distinct from "confusion" in its connotation of turmoil or upheaval.
Williwaw: A sudden, violent gust of cold wind. Distinct from "gust" in its specific location and temperature.
Yoghurt: A food made from milk fermented by added bacteria. Distinct from "curd" in its smooth texture and tangy flavor.
emogenus — a piece of writing plagued with emojis.
Reminder: you can build full-stack AI-powered apps wih Bubble.
cosmic tide — the idea that the whole life of the universe—from the big bang to the collapsing of the universe—is just one wave in an “ocean” that’s beyond space time. What if the comedy and tragedy and all possible beauty and all potential forms of life within our plenum is just the crashing of a single wave? It is a loop, a wave, a heartbeat, a breathe, a pendulum.
Can the hermetic practice be described as practice where symbolism is assigned to every action? Breathing, eating, washing, orienting in space, orienting in time, typing keys, etc. It is a kind of applied and active ritual superstition. The claim isn’t that a series of hand gestures will effect external outcomes, the claim is that a series of hand gestures can, with practice, be used to reliable usher specific mental states.
I had a lucid dream that had something to do with a dictionary. I was in my “home” reading through some large book, marking it up. Later on, I was at a book launch for some retired professor in a library (me in the future?). I decided to buy a copy, and at the register I realized it was the same book I had marked up and left at home. I tried to trace back how I got to that moment, realized I was in a dream, become lucid (!), and the thing whole scene uncontrollably melted away. Somehow, I got back to the cashier (not lucid anymore), and asked how the book transported from my home to the library. His rationalization involved the CIA.
April 14th, 2024
“The complete results of literacy did not supervene in Greece until the ushering in on the Hellenistic age, when conceptual thought achieved … fluency and its vocabulary [and syntax] became … standardized. Plato, living in the midst of this revolution, announced it and became its prophet.”
After dinner, Andy and I stopped by a bookstore that was next to St. Mark’s Comedy Club. Unorganized, lots of underground poetry, ended up getting “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” and a preface to Plato. I asked the guy if they had any Ed Sanders (his Tales of Beatnick Glory shaped my sense of history of this neighborhood). They had that same book, signed, but I didn’t care. He apparently had poetry mixed in that I couldn’t find. Then they brought a Tuli Kupferberg book to my attention (he was a co-writer of Sanders in the Fugs). Rare print. $250. The cover had 4 pictures of him, naked and erect. The inner pages had poems, manifestos, and drawings that were pretty cool. He was willing to go down to $35, but I still passed give how obscene the cover was.
Impressions on the standup comics and crowds in Midtown for the East Village.
Midtown: Long-Island like, sports and sex jokes, louder, more stereotypically New York, Mitch Hedburg, played into racial stereotypes, comfortable, comedy as a hobby, beer culture.
East Village: nuanced, less obvious punchlines, more believable personal stories, drug/marijuana/psychedelic inspired, struggling, comedy as lifestyle, weed culture.
On 2nd Avenue & St. Mark’s, there’s a noise band performing on a rooftop near the intersection, and as you walk east, the nature of the sound reflections change in weird ways.
Closeted eclectic.
To combat any grand ambitions of the future that are starting to turn toxic, just imagine that what you’ve already accomplished is all you ever need to do.
My Substack is already the fulfillment of my life’s potential. I didn’t have to end up here. Because of all my decisions over the last 15 years, I have now have this his site, some ideas on there I’m proud of. I can’t control the impact they have, I can’t force myself into the culture. I just need to show up, have generally bold goals, and work from a sense of peace of having already arrived where I want to be.
I am my grandest delusions. I am the quiet one at Thanksgiving
On that big escalator going up into Grand Central, and I visualized a full longitudinal section of Manhattan (from Battery Park to Central Park, showing the bedrock differences, and also the famous facade of GC). I imagined myself as a little scale figure in that architectural drawing, and as I moved my hand in real-life, a little pixel updated in the section. (imaginal perspective)
On expression (craft) — 27 patterns behind great essays
On language (logos) — selective dictionary, new thesaurus architecture
On ideas (history) — lineage of 100 root ideas through civilization
Where is the syllabus of the best essays to read in the last 5 years?
bonk : British slang for having sex. (vb) bonking is not the best idea. (n) they had a bonk. The phrase likely comes from “bonkers” (a thrust to the head that causes madness or insanity, but you can guess how the thrust was repurposed).
On the “Dead Internet Theory” — there’s a Quora bot that is using GPT to answer popular questions. It pulled a face from the site “This Person Does Not Exist,” and it has 1 million views in the last month. The weird thing, there aren’t even any financial incentives to doing this, there’s just a certain fetish to automate because we can. Eventually, the average person will realize that they’ve been catfished in 50% of their online interactions, and the Internet as we know it will be abandoned.
Listening to a classical composition from 1957 (The American Scene, by William Grant), and it really brings a beautiful and eerie moo around existence, childhood, society, and nature. It’s a frame-breaker.
April 13th, 2024
There’s a radical range of resolution in how I can interpret my day. Sometimes the smallest details, like the headphones of a passing pedestrian, can have something like religious significance, and every perception feels worthy of a paragraph, worthy of interpretive and sensorial prose. Other times, days escape in a passing fog without rapture or rupture.
I wonder if it all comes down to attention and how you can lace it with a self-suggesting mantra that everything is meaningful. Is it possible to stay in the pocket, where every moment feels prose worthy and destined to be a verse in some Great American Novel? Is every perception a clue into the ciphered reality of your life and your culture?
This gets into the distinction between peak experiences and extended flows. Maslow talked about how the beginning of self-actualization comes with a lot of peak experiences, but over time it flattens out into a constant flow state that’s barely noticed. Maybe my “days of fog,” would be at the intensity of a peak experience to my 18-year old self, but I’m just used to it now.
Still, that peak I felt after finishing my sungazer essay (last Thursday) felt like the place to always try and inhabit. It was a way of being that was bursting with energy, potential, confidence, acceptance, life, and wonder. Maybe that can’t be help perpetually, but could it be accessed every day?
Adaptive preference bias — the tendency to want to justify your own decisions. With time, all of your decisions become the right ones. You learn to love where you end up, instead going through the struggle of molting and moving your life in accordance with your values. It’s the danger of over-relying on your own emotions. While values are often emotionally derived, they can be frozen as abstract constellations that can guide you through disorienting storms … needs a much better coined word though (ie: oozy taste, bullshit identity cushions)
Gluggy — invented word for the smell of a harbor that sells half-rotten.
Calling someone an “egg shell,” “egg head,” or “hollow egg.”
April 12, 2024
Creators shy away from complexity because it’s not instantly legible or memeable. This leaves serious wisdom unshared. The power of AI is that a bot can encapsulate the full complexity of a given trade. It becomes accessible one bit a time, based on user input. Instead of crafting a meme, you’re ordering a universe of truth.
Hammer punch:
“A hammer punch is a hand tool used to drive a punch (a hardened metal rod) through a workpiece, usually to create a hole or to mark a specific point. The hammer punch consists of a handle and a striking surface, which is used to strike the punch and drive it through the material.”
Monkey paw:
“A monkey's paw is a talisman or amulet that is believed to grant wishes to its owner, but with disastrous consequences. The concept originates from a famous 1902 horror short story titled "The Monkey's Paw" by W. W. Jacobs. In the story, the paw of a dead monkey is enchanted to grant three wishes, but each wish comes with an unforeseen and terrible price.”
Aviary:
“An aviary is a large enclosure or cage designed to house birds. Aviaries are typically spacious enough to allow birds to fly freely within the enclosure and are often used in zoos, parks, or private residences to display a variety of bird species. Aviaries can be indoor or outdoor structures and are designed to provide a suitable habitat for the birds, including perches, nesting areas, and feeding stations.”
I am X, I am not X. Embrace both. Only when you can truly accept the negative side of a belief can you escape desperation and actually come close to it. If you never believe X in the first place, then you are stationary. Through embracing paradox, you maintain perpetual forward motion.
For me, I think the physical act of dying is more troublesome than the existential fear of not existing. I’m something like a “valetudinarian” (a hypochondriac who is unduly worried), so the idea of aging, warping, and decaying is a tough one.
In Greek mythology, Chronos was “Father Time” and he devoured his own children. One son got away and rose above time to become a God; this was Zeus. He formed an uprising against time and became the king of the pantheon. I think the Gods preferred an alternate type of time called “Kairos” a fleeting moment that was pregnant with opportunity. It’s not instrumentalized. It’s about having the presence to escape time and notice the opportunities in a moment that are calling.
“Time is a paradox. We exist in time, and yet, we are above time – if we choose to. In fact, we must transcend time if we want to redeem it. It tries to devour us, but we give it a stone. When we save those precious little moments from being devoured, they are transformed. By rising above time, we complete the chronological time (Cronus). We become timeless.”
“The Greeks called it Kairos – an opportune time. A pregnant time. We transform Cronos to Kairos when we use time to rise above time. We use the time to break into the timelessness. Every time we see why this moment in time is given us, we have an opportunity to bring it to fruition. We can bring it to fullness.”
Spongic time.
There’s something tragic about taking a system that ONCE might’ve caused a breakthrough, but then grew stale. Though the act of sharing it and meme-ing, it can go viral, but through going viral, it lodges itself in everyone’s heads and can’t be updated. It’s stunted and holds no future utility, for the creator or the users. It’s almost like a bastardized, deserted promise. It is an exteriorized shell that lost touch with the endlessly adapting interior.
When creators talk about using a “second brain” (an external knowledge management system), they risk forgetting the power of their own subconscious. Both could work in unison. You’re “deep subconscious” is untouchable and unknowable, it’s just your engrained way of working that you accumulate over your life through effort and you can barely start to explain it. Your “shallow subconscious” is trickier. All the interesting factoids you learned 2-6 months ago aren’t fundamental enough to seep into automaticity. Writing to capture these insights help. Memory can surface some of them, but I think we underestimate how relevant these logs and highlights can be. The ideal second brain would surface all these related captures as you are in the flow of prose.
Word choice often comes down to syllabicity as much as it comes down to meaning.
The last sentence of every paragraph benefits from an interline rhyme.
When you dive into complexity, it’s so off the trail (in the thickets) that you’re forced to invent & touch the source of language to share it.
There are two halves to a thinker. One is about the intention behind the mind: it covers the life you cultivate, your mental composition, the discipline of your attention, and your capacity for wonder, excitement, and creation. This is honest work that is immune to shortcuts. The other half is the expressive outlet: learning the theories of civilization, the minutest nuances of vocabulary, and the patterns of composing and expressing cultural works. These are all disruptable by AI.
The dishonest mind will gain powers in craft, but their creations will mean nothing, rotting about like abundant shadows in the old world of media. The honest mind in the super-suit will elevate into a new kind of being, creating trans-historical objects that will charter the course of the future.
“The new alchemists” has potential for a named group. Alchemy captures the romantic spheres of creativity, psychology, and spirituality. It’s also the pre-cursor to science. It’s what science forgot. Alchemy is all about embracing the paradox, and one of the central ones is how the path to psychic transcendence comes from putting the contents of our mind under a scientific method, one that demands heating and cooling, a constant reforging, an endless death and rebirth loop.
The insights from someone like Neitzche or Emerson are insights that arrived from a mind immersed in nature for decades.
Timeless works have an organized complexity within them. It is a vast universe, containing more wisdom than the mind can behold at once, meaning every time you dip in, you might notice some new layer you missed before (since you’ve evolved in the interim).
Sometimes, when you dive into an intellectual universe (Plato, McKenna, Emerson), it’s overwhelming. Before you can marvel at it, you’re confused. The first contact with complexity isn’t necessarily legible or comforting, but there’s a certain mystery that lets the patent ones stick with it and learn the local vernacular.
Once you learn how to swim, it’s like you have a life-time pass to an endless, regenerative, oceanic, inspiration swarm.
AI doesn’t just automate the bullshit work, it risks automating the manual joy of thinking, creating, and basically doing anything.
Music done right captures a resonance between math and language.
Harmony/rhythm is basically a space/time language that is mathematical (an octave is a unit of space, a measure is a unit of time, and it’s all about how you carve and layer within those units). Lyrics are obviously the linguistic half of it. In the most basic songs, a nice poem is layered over a clean sounding chord progression. The magic happens when there is synesthesia (a lyric is accompanied by specific chord that augments the meaning of that chord).
The classic historical example is how the Beatles designed their bridges in their early music. During the bridge, they’d switch the perspective of lyrics to start confessing the feelings of their inner world. This was accompanied by a tonal shift into minor chords. Teenage girls melted.
What would it look like if I started a publishing company? What could I learn from Frank Lloyd Wright? What would a modern renaissance guild or platonic academy be? It feels like most modern internet intellectual salons don’t work together to create something unique or original.
In my own diagrams, I’ve marked the beginning of the Renaissance as 1370, but Chris argued it goes back to the 1110s. Maybe the way to think of it is that there were “proto Renaissance figures” emerging for up to 2 centuries before.
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321): Italian poet, writer, and philosopher, best known for his Divine Comedy, which is considered a masterpiece of world literature and a significant influence on the Renaissance.
Peter Abelard (1079-1142): French philosopher and theologian who lived before the Renaissance but is known for his contributions to scholasticism and his famous love story with Héloïse.
St. Francis of Assisi (1181-1226): Italian friar and preacher who founded the Franciscan Order and is known for his devotion to poverty and love for animals. He is considered a key figure in the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.
The development of Italian poetry: The works of Dante, Petrarch (1304-1374), and Boccaccio (1313-1375) laid the foundation for the Renaissance literature and influenced writers across Europe.
Jacob Burckhardt was a Swiss historian professor, a mentor of Netizche, and one who coined the term “Renaissance.” In 1860, he published “The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy.”
AI explaining Bertrand Russel to me:
Bertrand Russell, the renowned British philosopher, mathematician and Nobel laureate, published "A History of Western Philosophy" in 1945. The book provides a survey of Western philosophy from the pre-Socratics to early 20th century philosophers.
One criticism sometimes leveled at Russell's work is that he gives relatively little attention to German philosophers, especially those associated with German Idealism like Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Russell was generally critical of Hegel's obscure style and what he saw as the authoritarian implications of his philosophy. So while these thinkers are covered, Russell devotes less space to them compared to ancient Greek philosophy, British empiricists, etc.
As for Ludwig Wittgenstein, he was Russell's student and later philosophical rival. Their relationship was complex - Russell initially saw Wittgenstein as a genius and supported his early work, but later came to view him as misguided.
Russell was especially critical of Wittgenstein's later philosophy as presented in works like Philosophical Investigations. He considered the concept of "language games" to be trivial and accused Wittgenstein of spouting nonsense. The "charlatan" remark you mention seems to refer to Russell's view that Wittgenstein's cryptic style and gnomic utterances gave the false impression of great profundity.
However, it's worth noting that Wittgenstein is widely regarded as one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. While his work is certainly challenging and unconventional, many consider it to be hugely insightful and influential, even if Russell ultimately rejected it. Eminent thinkers inspired by Wittgenstein include Elizabeth Anscombe, Saul Kripke, and many others.
What are the irreducible semantic units behind any language? I want to figure that out, draw them in 50 or so diagrams, and put it on a poster.
Charles Dickens
“Make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait.”
paragon : the perfect example of something.
slipshod (adj) : a sloppy lack of precision.
concordance : an alphabetical list of all usages of a word in a corpus.
presumptuous : taking liberties and overstepping boundaries with assumpitons.
The anecdotal edge:
hard-earned wisdom
domain expertise
enduring obsessions
Watching the Black Eyed Pease perform at Ultra in Miami in 2009 was a low point in my life (around the same time I dropped my finance major and reconsidered my life and forged who I am today). Wil.I.Am is like a modern Heironymous Bosch painting, a warning of what hell is like.
April 11th, 2024
Brene Brown (quoting Jung, quoting the alchemists):
Carl Jung wrote, 'Only the paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fullness of life.' We are complex beings who wake up every day and fight against being labeled and diminished with stereotypes and characterizations that don't reflect our fullness. Yet when we don't risk standing on our own and speaking out, when the options laid before us force us into the very categories we resist, we perpetuate our own disconnections and loneliness. When we are willing to risk venturing into the wilderness, and even becoming our own wilderness, we feel the deepest connection to our true self and to what matters the most.
Quick attempt to write out the logic beyond my Food of the Gods review:
1. Starting 2 million years ago, homo Habilis emerges from grasslands as meat eaters. This is cited as the main explanation for the growth of the brain, but it's not clear how eating meat led to genetic changes that would pass down to offspring.
2. However, in hunting mammals (ie: cattle), they came across their dung where psychedelic mushrooms grew. McKenna proposed that the mushrooms could be the source for the increase in brain size, for they're known to increase cognitive functioning. However, it's not clear how mushrooms get into the genome either.
3. Instead it's likely that mushrooms worked as a catalyst, they facilitate problem solving, formation of words, and tools, and solutions. None of these pass into the genes, but, the epigenetic blanket of inventions (vocabulary, tools, tribe norms) do get inherited. And we underestimate how something like language can drive brain size over time.
4. Therefore, the growth of brain size isn't something to do with biological evolution, but it's growth has more to do with the set of psychotechnology and technology we pass down to our kids. Proof of this phenomenon is how modern day feral kids who aren't raised with language have brain structures that are closer to a homo Erectus or homo Habilis, with limited ability to form language in our modern senes.
April 10th, 2024
The journey doesn’t really begin until you get to the swamp.
Bank of spicy takes:
Essay quality can be objectively measured.
AI editors will breed a generation of brilliant human writers.
Typewriters should be mandatory for writers.
Give kids remarkable tablets instead of iPads.
Take gibberish seriously if you want to improve your prose.
Your truest self is waiting for you in a pseudonym.
Write down every thought you have every day.
Read the dictionary A>Z.
The future of our species depends on re-designing the thesaurus.
Complexity is better than simplicity.
Personal growth doesn't begin without understanding paradox.
Teaching Jung in middle school would end the culture wars.
Digital time on lock screens traps society in manager mode.
You can induce out of body experiences at will.
The evolution from the alchemist to the scientist led to disaster.
Delete Notion and go touch paper.
AI will kill the Internet, and then resurrect it.
We should fuse orthodox ritual with psychedelics.
Modern society is a cult of convenience.
The killer app of VR is teleportation.
The great danger of VR is its ability to hijack awe.
If you look at depictions of the Putto in Renaissance art, you’ll find a mosaic of babies doing unreasonable things.
It seems like so much stress comes needing to have a clear and legible identity. "I'm X, but not Y." And when you truly live in the 3rd, you can't just easily label yourself and convey what you stand for to others.
Like Emerson said, you yourself become the island beyond categories. I think this natural aversion to detaching from spectrums and labels is the key thing that keeps the ego from developing & individuating (a Jungian term).
Curious; is there a moment where you detached from a dichotomy, and realized, "what even though I thought I was A, I'm partially B also, not fully B, but an A that accepts B." Showing you work this struggle might invite others to welcome this concept into their own realm of identity tension. (ie: currently trying to resolve the tension between being an orthodox Christian and a complete heretic)
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance:
“Do not require a description of the countries towards which you sail. The description does not describe them to you, and to-morrow you arrive there and know them by inhabiting them."
From Hermes Trismegistus:
"If then you do not make yourself equal to God, you cannot apprehend God; for like is known by like. Leap clear of all that is corporeal, and make yourself grown to a like expanse with that greatness which is beyond all measure; rise above all time and become eternal; then you will apprehend God. Think that for you too nothing is impossible; deem that you too are immortal, and that you are able to grasp all things in your thought, to know every craft and science; find your home in the haunts of every living creature; make yourself higher than all heights and lower than all depths; bring together in yourself all opposites of quality, heat and cold, dryness and fluidity; think that you are everywhere at once, on land, at sea, in heaven; think that you are not yet begotten, that you are in the womb, that you are young, that you are old, that you have died, that you are in the world beyond the grave; grasp in your thought all of this at once, all times and places, all substances and qualities and magnitudes together; then you can apprehend God."
April 9th, 2024
Locations for totality in the next30 years:
26 Spain, 27 Morocco, 28 Australia, 30 South Africa, 33 Alaska, 34 Egypt, 35 Japan, 37 New Zealand, 38 Australia, 39 Antarctica, 41 Kenya, 42 Malaysia, 44 Northwest Canada, 45 Florida, 46 Brazil, 48 Chile, 52 Southwest US, 53 Spain.
Watching a review of Jacob Collier’s 4th album, and everyone in the comments basically agrees: “incredible music, horrible artist.” Another quote stands out: "all the talent in the world can't grant you good taste."
If I were to give Jacob Collier artistic advice, I’d say “be a maximalist within constraints of timber.” I see his problem as having 70 vocal tracks, crazy mixing, loads of 2nd percussion—all that, plus bending time signatures and micro-tonal harmonies. He’s a musical genius without realizing the negative effects of his digital tools.
I’d like to see an album of his with 1 acoustic guitar, 1 electric guitar, 1 pianist, 1 bassist, 2 drummers. Basically, the constraint is you have 6 total people. You can’t have more than a 6-part harmony. If you want 4 second-percussion parts, that means all the stringed-players have to stop playing. Ideally, it is 6 actual people with different vocal registers that sustain from song to song.
On practicing vocals:
Can you consistently match pitches?
Can you consistently stay in key?
Can you identify the root note of any song?
From Reddit:
Jevon's paradox is the observation that as you make things more available and efficient demand for those things goes UP.
Examples: 1) Fuel efficiency advances in the 70s and 80s created the monster SUVs and Trucks of today full of features that use MORE fuel. 2) The cotton gin was though to use cotton so efficiently that slavery would be abolished. INSTEAD it increased demand for slavery as demand surged for clothes.
Humans are very energy efficient. And in a hyper abundant AI future, we may well want to work in gamified environments for fun or very little compensation. This may be enough to invent a bunch of bullshit jobs. Kind of a hyper version of what the Industrial Revolution did.
UFO footage from totality is trending on X (meaning: the shadow of a plane projected onto a cloud). I noticed 3 back-to-back messages that are syntactically identical. All posts have since been deleted. I think thees messages are designed as bait to bring you to a profile, but then removed for fear of being caught as robot spam:
POST 1: https://twitter.com/selenagomedic/status/1777602307498127682
In the midst of the much-anticipated 2024 solar eclipse in Texas, reports of a mysterious UFO sighting have left experts baffled. Witnesses describe a large, brightly-lit object moving swiftly across the darkened sky, sparking a wave of speculation and excitement among onlookers. While some dismiss it as a mere coincidence, others are intrigued by the timing of the event. Investigations are ongoing to determine the origins of this enigmatic visitor. Could it be a trick of the light or something more otherworldly? Only time will tell. [#AlienMystery]
POST 2: https://twitter.com/Erwin6672195870/status/1777554571335802896
In an unexpected turn of events during the highly anticipated solar eclipse in Texas, multiple witnesses reported an unusual sighting of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) streaking across the sky. The event, which coincided with the rare celestial phenomenon, has sparked intrigue and speculation among locals and experts alike. While some attribute the mysterious lights to natural or man-made phenomena, others remain open to the possibility of extraterrestrial involvement. The occurrence has added a fascinating layer to the already mesmerizing solar eclipse experience, leaving many curious minds pondering the unknown. [#UFOsighting]
POST 3: https://twitter.com/Kena847869/status/1777554984764142077
In a peculiar incident amidst the highly anticipated Texas Solar Eclipse of 2024, reports have emerged of a UFO sighting. Witnesses claim to have spotted a mysterious object hovering near the eclipse path, igniting discussions about extraterrestrial presence or mere coincidence. While skeptics attribute it to optical illusions or drones, UFO enthusiasts are intrigued by the timing. The event has sparked a mix of curiosity and skepticism among observers, adding a new dimension to the celestial spectacle. As investigations continue, the mystery surrounding the UFO sighting during the Texas Solar Eclipse of 2024 deepens. [#UnexplainedPhenomenon]
If I were to reverse engineer the prompt: 1) it lays out the context with an emotional reaction. 2) It mentions how people reacted to the event. 3) It attempts to analyze the reactions. 4) It describes two points of view. 5) It ends on something open-ended. I imagine someone has set up a prompt to run this same script across any trending story, adding different hashtags (associated with the story) to increase exposure, and then deletes itself within 24 hours after the trend passes.
April 8th, 2024
Hartford smells like sewage from the highway.
Counted 108 “diamonds” (reflective beads in the lake). It’s a form of white light the eye can tolerate. There were obviously more, that’s just how many I counted in a single fixed perspective before getting bored.
Looking through blackout glasses is aesthetically boring (look, a cartoon crescent moon!) but symbolically interesting. The sun is at such an intensity that in order for the human eye to look at it, everything else is imperceptible.
My logs about the solar eclipse were all pushed into an essay called sungazer.
April 7th, 2024
Sun stats:
The sun is 1.3 million times bigger than the sun.
1 astronomical unit (AU) = the distance from the Earth to the Sun. The size of the sun is 1% of an AU!
On “transneptunian objects:”
Planets on a shared plane: The planets in our solar system do indeed orbit the Sun in roughly the same plane, known as the ecliptic plane. This is due to the way the solar system formed from a rotating disk of gas and dust called the protoplanetary disk, not because of centripetal force. As the disk cooled, the material within it began to clump together, forming the planets, which continued to orbit in nearly the same plane.
Transneptunian objects (TNOs): These are objects that orbit the Sun at greater distances than Neptune. TNOs include dwarf planets like Pluto, Eris, Makemake, and Haumea, as well as smaller objects in the Kuiper Belt and scattered disk.
Orbital inclinations: While most TNOs have orbits that are close to the ecliptic plane, some do have significant inclinations. For example, Eris has an orbital inclination of about 44 degrees, and some scattered disk objects can have even higher inclinations. However, it is an overstatement to say that these objects orbit at "wild, orthogonal angles." Most TNOs still have orbital inclinations of less than 30 degrees.
A total eclipse passes over any given location once every 500 years (on average). They are mathematically predictable. Greece could calculate it to the day, and by the 1700s they could calculate it to the minute. In the last few hundred years, much of our knowledge about the sun has coming from observing it during eclipses.
On line at the bagel store, I see a “tournament director” (as it says on the back of his shirt) making chit-chat with Lori Ann (as he called her). It was something like a track-and-field-coach—student-parent acquaintanceship. Sounded like they were talking about TV shows. I paradoxically saw this in both lights: as the power of local community, and the sadness that our cultural anchor is cheap entertainment. It had the veneer of glee and happiness, but I couldn’t help but imagine a weird underlying alienation.
April 6th, 2024
The Long Island highways are flashing “ARRIVE EARLY, STAY LATE,” to warn everybody of the upcoming eclipse-induced traffic surge.
Since my wife brought her grandfather’s old analog radio into our apartment, we basically always have classic music running the background.
For $1,000, you can buy the 20 volume Oxford English Dictionary. What’s the case to have this physical instead of using the website?
Goon Cave : like a home office, but strictly for masturbation. This is one of the weirdest slang terms I’ve come across (from the Intrinsic Podcast). It gets into the Goon Cave (overly masculine) vs. the Longhouse (overly feminine). Even saw a post called, “Escaping Plato’s Goon Cave.” It’s a word for a subculture that glorifies porn. The definition is bleak:
“Gooning is a slang term referring to a sexual practice that involves a person masturbating to pornography for prolonged periods of time without climaxing (a process known as "edging") in order to achieve "the goon," a so-called sensation of full mental numbness and dissociation from anything unrelated to the process.”
The term “gooning” went viral since the pandemic (33x in popularity) and there are subreddits with millions of people. It’s hard to know the difference between reality and satire, as some people claim to do this for somewhere between 1-48 hours straight. I think it’s safe to separate this phenomenon from the moral debate around porn (it’s about self-inflected catanoia that addles your brain and absorbs most of your waking day.)
Don’t get too excited about new systems you build for yourself (here’s a transcription of an audio note from Plexus):
You have an early excitement for the fact that you've designed something, that you've taken initiative, that you are, you know, making a move to better yourself and close the gap between where you are and your vision. That's all very exciting, but the system is kind of created blindly, right? It's a theoretical abstract thing and you think that your time and your situation can flow through it and lead to the outputs you want, but so often the systems you build, whether they're analog or digital, simple or complex, something is lost in the abstraction and when it makes contact with your life. Either it doesn't fully solve it, it gets you the wrong thing, it gets you what you want but with a terrible side effect. I mean, there's all these truths that you have to iron out through experience and so what might be important to develop … [is] a change log of your systems … Map out the totality of what it is you're going for and then … be extremely specific as to what you think that [it] can deliver … Then, at a certain interval [check in… is it working?] … [if it] didn't lead to what you expected … you have to re-tweak the whole architecture.
Weird dream: my aunt and uncle got a new house in Florida that was attached to the outfield of a professional baseball stadium. For some reason it brought tears of joy lol (must’ve been some kind of subconscious release, a return to childhood, the flattening of time, who knows … I had a similar effect in a dream of my elementary school). Weird to think I cry (tears of joy) more in dreams than in real life (perhaps never). Only time I really remember crying uncontrollably as an adult was on the 20 years anniversary of 9/11 (for very different reasons, after watching far too much shaky cam footage). Ended up catching 2 foul balls back-to-back.
April 5th, 2024
Some points to defend the POV that “essay quality is objective.”
Specific scope: You have to set the scope small enough to “essays.” Books, memoirs, newsletter and other written mediums have their own criteria. Songs and films are even more different. I think it’s important not to get bogged down in genre, and instead to see genre as a culturally accepted groove of patterns over something more fundmanetal.
Flexible patterns: All essays share the same objective components. They each have an idea, a linear flow (structure), and a way to render words (voice). You can zoom in on each. With structure, there is storytelling, form, and flow. Within form, there is sequence, cohesion, and parallelism. What I’m not doing is declaring any one sequence to be superior to the others. There isn’t a master template. There are granular patterns that can be expressed in infinite ways, but they all still fall under the same realm of measurement. A good framework should be able to account for the most extreme forms of experimentation; it could even help the wildest experiments get away with it and still resonate with a human.
The wrapper: It helps to think of the essay as the wrapper for thought. You put in an idea, you structure it, and you use specific strings of words. This system isn’t here to tell you which idea is better than the others. I can’t tell you if an essay on the Powerpuff Girls is more or less important than an essay on Climate Change. But, we can judge each through how effective its rhetorical wrapper is. A batshit, bad idea can be structured into a great essay (ie: why nuclear was is good!) Of course, truth, purpose, and vision all matter, but are independent from measuring if an essay meets it’s platonic ideal / max potential.
Biological constraints: The critique of something might boil down to the intentions of the writer (the intentional fallacy) or the way a politically charged reader responds to it (the affective fallacy). Yes, intentions and reactions do matter, but an essay can be evaluated in it’s own right on the idea, structure, and voice. Humans share biological traits like bandwidth, memory, empathy, linearity; we are sight and sound based creatures that have to perform mental labor to interpret strings of text. The ideal form of essays is based on our hardware.
Lanthimos went to a film school in Athens that is highly influenced by Ancient Greek composition principles (especially Aristotle). It’s interesting to consider how an ancient culture can into something timeless/sacred but then lose it. Even though it can go dormant, it’s so potent that any culture who revives it goes through a period of rebloom / cultural molting. During the whole Renaissance, the Greeks were under Turkish rule, meaning they were cut off from connecting with their own roots. What’s the story of modern Greece tapping into its cultural source?
Fiction is about letting go of control and letting a universe or character unwind through the aeolian forces of your imagination.
Children model so much of their behavior from how parents act. Note to future self: instead of trying to discipline, lecture, or shape kids, focus on yourself (aka: don’t be a hypocrite). Example: they’re going to want to stay up as late as you.
a/an : “A was modified from the Egyptian hieroglyph representing the eagle. In Hebrew it was an ox, and in Greek it was a “symbol of a bad AUGURY in the sacrifices.” The distinction between a/an happened around the 1300s.
aardvark : South African “earth pig”
aaron’s serpent : “something so powerful as to swallow up minor powers (Exod. vi, 10-12). Thus, Prussia was the Aaron’s serpent that swallowed up the lesser German States between 1866 and 1870.” For context, Aaron was “the patriarch of the Jewish priesthood,” and “possibly connected with haaron, ‘the ark.’”
abandonment : ties into atheism and “God is Dead” from Nietzche; the feeling of a once-religious society suddenly without a father; abandoned. “Concept central to atheistic EXISTENTIALISM. According to … Sartre, God does not exist and life therefore has no intrinsic purpose or meaning. Man has been ‘abandoned’ in the universe and must create his own morality and code of values without the assistance of any divine being.”
abbadon : “the angel of the bottomless pit (rev. ix, 11), from Heb. abad, he perished. Milton used the name for the pit itself: ‘in hall her gates Abbadon rues, Thy bold attempt.’ Paradise Regained, IV, 624.”
abdals : “the name given by Moslems to certain mysterious persons whose identity is known only to God and through whom the world is able to continue in existence. When one dies another is secretly appointed by God to fill the vacant place.”
abduction : Latin, abductus; “to lead away”
abject (adj.) : miserable (wretched, thrown away, cast off)
abjure : to reject solemnly.
ablution (n) : a washing; in Cantebury Tales, means “the cleansing of impurities”—this makes me think it’s more about ritual washing than practical dirt cleaning.
abney’s effect : from Sir William Abney (1843-1920); “the phenomenon … when a large area is suddenly illuminated, the light seems to appear first in the centre of the patch (rather than appearing all at once) and then spreads outwards towards the edges. When the light is extinguished, the edges disappear first and the centre last.”
abstraction : abs = without, tract = grip, tion = a state; “a state of no grip.” Something is abstract when there’s nothing figurative or recognizable for the mind to grip onto. “The sense of an abstract idea appeared in 1644, in Milton’s Of Education.”
abstruse : hard to understand; ab=before, trudere=thrust,push,enter; it’s a kind of confusion where you can’t even find the entry point to begin conceptualizing it. Some types of confusion give you clear elements that are confusing from a lack of cohesion. But abstrusity is about being impenetrable.
absurd : not just “irrational”… the meaning of “surd” is revealing … “borrowed from latin “surdus” (deaf, unheard, silent, dull, out of tune, senseless) … it’s as if absurdity is the kind of insane behavior you would expect from a creature with it’s senses … Also relates to “alogos,” the opposite of “the logos,” meaning, absurdity is deviation from the diving patterns of the universe.
abundance : this word has a positive connotation, but it’s Latin equivalent, abundare, translates to “overflow,” creating the image that something is bursting out of it’s intended container. Consider how when something is overflowing (knowledge, entertainment, friends), we tend to value each unit less.
accede : to agree to a demand (cede = yield).
accord : to be one one heart.
accoutremaniac : one who obsessively organizes.
accumulate : “to heap up in mass.”
accuse : from the Latin word causari, meaning, “to give as cause”; while this is usually cast in a negative light, it could be seen as the act of inferring the hidden works behind unknown phenomenon.
acolyte : not just an altar boy or assistant, but the Greek word akolouthos infers it’s about someone who is on your side along the uncertain road, path, or journey. Someone helping cast light on the path ahead.
alpha privative : The Greek prefix where “a” is used to mean “taking away, depriving.” It’s similar to a-, an- in Sanskrit, in- in Latin, and un- in English. Examples: ahistorical, atemporal, anemia (without blood), amorphous (without form), anonymous (without name).
baroque : typically referred to a style in art or music, but also references “baroque thinking” a writing style full of elaborate arguments, historical references, and polysyllabic words; 1600-1750s; ornamentations, complex involution, motion; exaggerated poses; a reaction against the proportion and balance of the Renaissance; busy; around the time of the microscope and the telescope, leading to a feeling of wonder, mysteriousness, and spirituality.
bathetic : when something of high quality descends into triviality.
beastiary : “an allegorical story in which the principal characters are animals; often employs anthropomorphism, a form of personification. Also referred to as an apologue, beast epic, or beast fable.
belletrist : “fine letters,” (French), a writer known for light non-fiction (addressed to friends?) more regarded for its style than for its substance.
chapbook : “popular ballads, stories, poetry, and other forms of literature published in pamphlets or small book form and sold by peddler known as chapmen from the 16th-18th century.”
cognate : from cognatus, “of common descent.” Used to describe words that come from the same root.
coterie : “a group of friends or writers with similar literary interests.”
didactic : “poetry or prose meant to be instructive, to teach a lesson.” (contrasting Oscar Wilde’s notion of “art for art’s sake).
hagiography : “originally, an idealized religious biography of a saint or martyr; now refers to any biography that idealizes or idolizes the subject of the biography; from “written by inspiration (Greek).”
koonselroman : actually spelled (Kunstlerroman); “a type of narrative that traces the development of an artist either from childhood or from artistic immaturity; from “artist novel” (German). Ex: ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ [James Joyce].”
kowtow (n.) : “an act of slavish submission. (1804) … [the] Chinese custom of touching the ground with [your] forehead to show respect or submission … borrowing from ‘k’o’t’ou,’ literally, ‘knock the head.’” Related to the words “fawn” and “truckle.”
polemic : “a detailed attacked against a person or institution; from ‘pertaining to war’ (Greek).”
prosody : the musicality of language (pros=toward, ode=song/poem).
roman a these : “a novel with a message of social importance; from ‘thesis novel’ (French).”
April 4th, 2024
“Bang bang” is when you have two consecutive meals at different restaurants.
“Hoover” (vb) is when someone tricks another to come back into a toxic relationship.
New record, the first time I learned the time today was 6:12 pm.
I’m sure someone’s written about the romanticism of bookstores before, or at least a “How to Bookstore” manual. There’s a kind of Keuroacian self-bullshit I experienced going to the Strand, some grand narrative, some story on the lifelong pursuit of logos. Then the first 10 minutes is a whimsical flick through the carefully curated on-display books, adjacent to others going through the same dance. But there is something real when you get lost in the reference section in the back of the basement for 3 hours, and you’re asking the employees oddly specific questions they can’t answer, and your just sitting there reading full pages of books you end up not getting, and you grasp the radical scale between the huge amount of reconnaissance you’ve done and the still infinitely dense basement.
The church near the Strand bookstore on 13th/14th. Walked by this so many times; now I know where it is. It also reminds me of that AI recolorized video from the 1920s, where people walked on this lawn outside these buttresses.
From Plato, the word “eidos” means: "form" "essence", "type," or "species." There’s also the phrase “eidetic memory” which is the ability to lucidly visualize things in the mind. Worth thinking about architecture not through buildings, but through categorizing and visualizing the elements of something.
A “hyperobject” a thing too complex to be beheld, can still be mapped. Essay Architecture is part of an effort to map the logos. The essay is the middle-scale, but it also zooms into words, and zooms out to ideas.
“Hunch-hucking” (phrase by
) is when you get behind and shill a flimsy theory.I’ve been noticing that paragraphs are stronger when they close on showing instead of telling. The power of closing on an image is that it requires reader visualization and interpretation. It’s active, it’s open-ended, and it creates a draw to the next paragraph in search of some kind of resolution. Telling on the other hand is logical, revealing, and definitive.
The end of the paragraph is basically the end of a scene. It’s a natural dip-out point for a reader. Showing at the end of the paragraph is like a micro-cliffhanger to keep them lodged in the text. It’s critical for reader trance.
Little visual anecdotes (often in the form of personal stories) are powerful ways to visually connect meaning to the main idea. For example, compare, “I was crying in the car,” with “As soon as we got onto 295 South I started crying.” The second one isn’t just more vivid, it hooks the visual into the theme of the essay (which is about moving across the country).
Fucking gerunds! “A gerund is a verb in its present participle form (root verb + “ing”) that acts as a noun in a sentence.
How would you use commas here?
a) long, fucking cold winters …
b) long, fucking-cold winters …
c) long, fucking, cold winters …
d) long, cold fucking winters …
e) long, cold-fucking winters …
f) long, cold, fucking winters.
“I feel like a detective reading between the lines to figure out what I was really thinking, what I was really feeling.” From a friend re-reading their old blog … Whenever you read back on writing from your past-self, you notice the gap between what’s being said, the underlying tension, and how things actually play out. With foresight, it’s easy to catch your past-self bullshitting itself. How might the current self be bullshitting?
When you re-name something in a new way after a comma, it’s called an “appositive” (Bryan Garner). This can be done with nouns, verbs, or even full phrases. “The cold, lonely winter.” “My friend, John, told me…” “…the thing I wanted, the thing I needed.”
Punctuation vs. grammar:
Punctuation is about mechanics and syntax. It’s about the visual elements to help you interpret meaning. It involves everything from spacing, to symbols, to capitalization).
Grammar is more about the logical modulation of words to be “correct.” It’s involved with parts of speech, clauses, subjects, nouns and verbs.
As a native speaker, grammar is so automatic and engrained that there’s much to learn around writing without even paying attention to it. I’ve found the study of punctuation to have more of an impact. Maybe at some point, a dive into grammar would be worth it, but it seems so technical and so detached from expressive power. I’d like to learn what I’m missing.
On the naming of things:
Places = capitalized, no italics (New York, Italy, Mary’s Theatre);
Book, blog names, container of works = italics (Wait But Why, Dean’s List);
Essay titles, individual works = quotes (“Go touch paper")
Look into lotus visualizations on the throat and what that has to do with dream recall. Chakras can be cringy when explained to be scientific, but maybe they make sense as symbolic. Meaning, there are archetypal (built-in) reasons why the mind likes to associate certain parts of the body with certain things.
quandry — a situation where the decision to make is unclear or perplexing.
scruple — a feeling of hesitation in a morally ambiguous situation.
April 3rd, 2024
7:15 am (Kind of funny that Garrett's car's clock is wrong) — Yehudis’s first Jeep ride, we’re debating if it’s worth rushing for flights. I don’t know what time it is, but I have a feeling it’s a crunch and she might join the after-party. Boarding is 8:10, and now it’s 7:53. We got to meet those Coptic Orthodoxians who overhead our non-traditional riffs and jives on Jesus. Driving calmly, talking about road trip freak crashes and license fees for $280. Conversation winds into biohacking, the 100% happening typewriter conference, and weird dreams. The dream stands out where God kills himself to learn about hell on a reconnaissance mission, and at that moment Garret dramatically swerved around a loose tire that materialized in the road and he saved our lives.
10 years before the Apple Vision Pro (AVP), I demoed a shitty VR headset at my friend's apartment and it literally changed my life. The Oculus DK-2 was a hunk of plastic, tangled in wires, designed by a teenager, with only a million pixels in each eye. “This is the future.” As undercooked as the technology was, it put me in a crude hallucination, and for someone who just finished a grueling 5-year architecture degree, that was game-changing. My life re-oriented around that demo. Soon after, I quit my job and started a VR company. By day, I put NYC developers in trance state, and by night I hosted things like VR Bong Night. I’ve been in headsets for 100s of hours and have 8 of them stashed in my closet. I learned new languages in Unreal Engine and built spatial interfaces. I believed in the Metaverse. Everything I knew during my analog years of architecture school got me to believe that “spatial computing” would revive the lost merits of paper. We just needed a headset that was powerful enough…
Quote from After Babel:
“Another mistake is believing that our children are more advanced than others in terms of the strength of their character; unfortunately, our values are not passed through our genes. Despite our efforts to train our teens to “do the right thing” on their screens, teens are not gifted with the willpower needed for social media. We cannot continue to believe the fallacy that we can teach our kids more willpower and build discipline to resist temptations by giving them more time with addictive activities. Science does not support the notion that exposure strengthens willpower. The opposite is true; repeated exposure tends to weaken, rather than strengthen, the ability to resist temptation. The established method for resisting temptation is to remove access to the addictive activity or substance. In the case of smartphones, this means removing access until the risks are lower and the reasoning center of the brain is more developed.”
What if my essays were read out loud, put on YouTube, and augmented with imagery? Maybe Spotify too? Kind of neat to imagine my body of work across multiple mediums.
I see time to be directly linked to attention. You can fuse with your surroundings (archaic time), lock into one object (magical time/flow/addiction), orient around events, narrative or cycles (mythical time), or obsess over budgeting hours and minutes (rational time). The idea of escaping rational time and realizing “I am time” is liberating, and maybe one of the strongest ways to rewrite your psyche.
Isabel on time:
“I tend to be quite good at losing track of time compared to the average person—a blessing and a curse. I can get lost in a task and have hours zoom by me like seconds. I can fall into a conversation and only get pulled out of it when my stomach cries out in hunger or I suddenly feel so parched that I need to excuse myself. It is a good sign to me when it’s my body that calls me to pause, instead of my mind pulling me away from where I am. It’s usually a sign that I am in the right place, a place I want to sink deeper into, to spend more time in.
Lately, I’ve been trying to embody this idea that I am the source of time. I love that Einstein quote about how time is an illusion, about how it passes differently depending on how we relate to it. I find that when I am losing track of it, when it feels like time is coming through me, from me, instead of something that is happening to me—crushing me under the heaviness its demands and threats—I feel so much closer to my true self, to the ultimate expression of what is within me. I feel most at home in myself when I am losing track of time.”
Out that window to my left is more than a brick wall; beyond the side of my neighbor’s two-family is the sum of America (besides Maine, Boston, etc.). I face southwest from a perch east of the Manhattan. I’ve failed to consider the geography beyond my own apartment. Cardinal directions matter! Obviously I can’t see more than a few hundred feet, let along bend my vision around the curve of the Earth; it’s a symbolic thing (out that window are my fellow Americans! The bewildered, cultural refugees in need of a voice!) In some sense though, if I could transcend the human limits and become a 50,000 foot God (which maybe we all are), then I could see California through my window.
To drugify something means to either improve quantity, simplify access, increase potency, or introduce novelty. The Apple Vision Pro succeeds with all 4: more screens, instantly spawnable, at the best resolution you’ve ever seen, levitating in places where screens have never gone before. The AVP is aesthetic heroin (/morphine?).
If stuck in a narrative frame, the easiest way to get out of it is to shift into a more primal form of embodiment (archaic time, mythic time); basically, get out of your head. Go for a walk. Get into the details on something. Through escaping self-reflection, the ego unravels on its own and creates a blank state for meaning to be reformed.
It’s hard to write long-form essays without serious, socially-enforced deadlines. The reason my writing group (with Garrett & Yehudis) worked in October, November was because we had shared stakes. We all knew we were publishing on the 1st. Since we were linking to each other, you really can’t miss the train.
April 2nd, 2024
Today’s freshman architecture students are almost immediately thrown into a pickle around technology: should we use software to automate the creation of our drawings and models? I was fortunate to take my first semester at the University of Miami, a classical program where there wasn’t even an option. No automation allowed. I literally turned nocturnal for a semester because I had to handle stipple the whole skyline of Manhattan (an undertaking that took a hundred hours and a fair amount of marijuana).
The killer use case for the Apple Vision Pro: a prop for YouTube audience growth.
From John Vervaeke: there’s a difference between lying and bullshitting. Lying is about debating the nature of the truth, but bullshitting is more dangerous. A bullshitter acknowledges a lack of truth, but compels you to look somewhere else. When you’re bullshitting yourself, it’s not that your dishonest with yourself, it’s that you don’t have the courage to look at things head on.
After posting a Twitter thread last night, it’s very tempting to check my notifications after waking (I don’t have it on my phone, so I’d have to go to my computer). In the flow of creating it, I was seriously enjoying myself and not really caring about performance. But now, it sneaks back. I’m curious and eager.
The vacant mind is the one that risks getting corrupted by vanity and metrics.
Maybe the trick is to have something in flow at all times (a proactive narrative, a flow, or a dissolving into the environment). Bad stories can spoil everything. As I made it, I was totally on the “do this every day train,” and after watching it not perform, there’s that rational critic saying, “why bother?”
April 1st, 2024
Two notes from Sublime:
Syzygy means "when opposites become one." To step through the mirror itself is the art of illumination, of self-transformation. Through syzygy, the magician creates specific changes in their own behavior.
Our relation to ideas is an inextricable symbiosis, like that between plant and pollinator, a mutualism in which neither can survive without the other. At the dawn of civilization, a covenant was made between humans and these alien entities that live in our minds--honor and respect each other and all will flourish beyond their wildest dreams.
This is the 2nd night I’ve tried working past sunset with candles, and it’s seriously clicking. We’ll see if it’s just novelty or if it lasts, but I can share my impressions.
Basically, it all comes down to friction. Most of the room is illegible, and you have to physically move and orient your candle in order to see things. It’s an active/embodied process, which seems to keep me awake and active, when usually I’d get sleepy (from lights-on screen-time).
There’s a flickering and it brings up connotations of church (peace), and also paranormal fears of the dark (fear). It’s just a totally different headspace. Given my fear of burning my place down with fire, having a live flame adds the slightest element of danger to keep me on edge (ie: awake). A neglection could burn the room down, theoretically.
We take for granted how the invention of electricity completely changed human sleep cycles (from bi-phasic to mono-phasic)
In producing my “bonus thread” for my assay definition, I came across so much fascinating alchemical artwork. Need to dive deeper into that. It helped refine my intrigue to visit Prague. 3 places AI recommended:
The Speculum Alchemiae Museum: This museum is dedicated to the history of alchemy and features various exhibits, including artwork, laboratory equipment, and manuscripts.
The Strahov Monastery Library: This historic library contains many ancient texts and manuscripts related to alchemy, as well as ceiling frescoes depicting alchemical themes.
The Museum of Alchemists and Magicians of Old Prague: Located in a historic building that once housed a real alchemist's laboratory, this museum showcases the history of alchemy in Prague through exhibits and artwork.
It also mentioned “The Chemical Heritage Foundation” in Philadelphia.
I wrote a typewriter essay about DMT and the afterlife, and it’s making want to try DMT but I have that zinger of “death by astonishment” in my head. Wonder if DMT breathwork or holotropic breathing are safer methods to learn to navigate those waters.
Oscar Wilde on rendering shame:
"The books that the world calls immor(t)al are books that show the world its own shame.”
Oscar Wilde on pseudonyms:
"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
Similar to how buildings are oriented (NSEW) based on religious narratives, so to can you meditate in a direction based on an idiosyncratic narrative. In lodges the self in an environment, and increase the scale from room to earth.
7/8 beat:
K- x- S- x- K- K- SS
KK SS KK Sx -x Kx Sx
There’s a neat illusion where it actually reads as 4 + 4 + 4 + 2 because of the snare spacing (it’s always on the 3rd of a 4/4).
Here’s that same beat written out as 4+4+4+2:
K- x- (3) S- x-
K- K- (3) SS KK
SS KK (3) S -
K- S- (now 3 is missing and it loops!)
And to make it really funky, it could start on a Snare after it loops.
Averaged 3.85/meetings per week in Q1. I remember when I used to average 4 meetings a day. There’s likely a correlation between how many meetings you have per week and your likeliness to consider getting off the clocks.
There’s an important distinction between “tasks” and “flows.” Batching these things into “to-dos” is a mistake; they even require different types of systems (whether software or analog).
I use a spiral-bound college-ruled book for tasks. This is my vehicle for manager mode, and I try to keep it closed unless I want to get a lot of things done in a short period of time. I have to check in on this 1-2 times a day, or things fall through the cracks.
But then, on a different desk, I have post-its sprawled out, each one representing a flow. “AVP II.” “Sketches for EA.” “The definition of abysmal.” These are creative flows that are unpredictable and require total immersion and spontaneity. The ability to stack, re-arrange, hide post its makes it more playful. The idea is to feel it out, grab it, and then do the thing.
shambles — more than a mess; it’s when something typically whole is torn up into unrecognizable parts; it’s a gross word that comes from the slaughterhouse.
Existentialism is when the rational mind hijacks the meaning creation center.
If you’re able to make and break frames at will, you’ve discovered the infinite energy glitch. It keeps you nimble, motivated, and present. A frame might always be a narrative (in mythic time), and by shifting to magic/archaic time, you can shed a stale perspective on your day. There’s something alchemical here. Each pole has a positive/negative, so any negative state can be solve by switching to the diametric positive poll (obviously this needs a diagram).
The habit of tracking time is pretty weird, but it brings me back to the medium of logging. 8:00, 8:24, 10:52 am. It’s the most banal, self-referential thing to capture, but it primes the pump.
Random dreams: 1) in some surreal Japanese sculpture park; weird floral beauty; peninsula like; ocean waves get more and more violent until there’s a massive swell; 3 kids there, and 2 seem to get knocked out (killed?) from the water; might relate to reading DFW’s Shipping Out before bed, which describes the dread of the ocean. 2) weird evil forces at the tree farm; tall, purple, biblical, monsterish; I’m running from outside, to inside, to running down streets to the train station; then rationally wondering, is that limited to that one spot? Or is this bound to be a pandemic demon?
A full archive of all my logs (WIP):