Logs | 2023-11-November

Dec 10, 2023

November 30th, 2023

8:58 pm — Your Instagram feed is a mirror of what you want, and it provides comfort because it’s low effort. It’s the instant realization and reminder of your dreams, with extreme convenience and ease. It’s vicarious living as a feature.

4:43 pm — Alliteration, repetition, and rhythm were tools from pre-literature cultures to make ideas memorable and more likely to be passed down.

11:21 am — Live lexicon: no inner talk, meaning, inner thought gets immediately translated into text, and there are no open loops. It’s a comprehensive live dump.

November 29th, 2023

9:28 pm — 2 hr 57 min of new reading in my inbox, incoming from just today.

9:10 pm — My all-time worst Google comment ever:

Blook blook. Jun sickle spawn the lex-lexo-lexe-roo-roo-graph until Cansbrenk's style turns into extremely legible Anglosaxophone turkey junk with gravy prose of alchemical undeerstannk que Hooba in the pliterscophany of jingo-colon; fur-breakenstein :: cut :: cut :: seven healthy spent seven hens on hexa-hon gone fish. Bonfire and dish-snitch in the tag rag joonka bean devolla volko in the sinksunk skyfungaloscopy on din-tran samboocha mooch mucha kunk into the sig-swarmereskofee in grave duggers own home six feeet in 6s9 sjjds *j3j sj I I do think you have a point though perhaps there's value in fading in and out of legibility and a certain points it's just the sheer excess of a glig glob jingle-blog and December turns white and red and sun's weep with presents for deaf and holy wundersaint kids oh the babes of yesteryawn as centuries spoil and croon and demand warmer and warmer sacs of coo the infantile nations pur and pawn and spawn stocking of christmas demon elves who hitch hypersonic sleds through 6 dimensions until the editors show up with swords and say, "excuse me sir, I think you are well past, not just your word quota, but also the social acceptable quotas of silllieness, and for that we submit you for 65 years in the jing jong jung prison cells of unacceptable hygeine standards where leaf-shaped roaches and roochies play cards and determine your Wednesday afternoons over 20,000 dice rolls and butterflies chirch and screetch and expand in seventeen specific version of the inifnite where you grasp every version of yourself at once and melt back into a small fish, flopping ontop of standing desk still with dreams of being a Substacker, but with gills instead of lungs, unsuitable for your environment and you can just flop around for likes and accolodaes. this your torture, mr. kincoozie." what? when did that becomes my name? when did I become you? when did churooka rooka it never ends it never ends it never ends because I'm procastinating from my very logical and orderly "Notion PM reset" [comment limit]

7:28 pm — Roochies the size of leaves.

6:31 pm — One of the main tenants of psychedelic progressivism is that mystical experiences should be made accessible to everyone, and for the first time today I’ve second guessed that.

5:53 pm — An irony of history…

5:30 pm — Modeling conversations vs. congratulations.

5:18 pm — Moving from Twitter to Substack, it’s natural to be scarred. That’s a version of social media totally build on external validation, sacrificing the self for attention, and competing to play infinite status games. Content is just a currency. Substack feels like a slower and more expressive game, and it’s important to not bring the old-world norms with you. Don’t associate worth with numbers at all.

4:54 pm — Paper architect…

2:45 pm — Any rubric I make is limited by latest conception of what makes good writing. Hopefully this keeps improving, leaving old rubrics out of date. Meaning, the better the rubric gets, the lower the scores should get for the same draft.

1:24 pm — COLD FACE— I lost my hat from Montreal already, and a new one is on its way through Prime. Writing a note into my phone, with a peripheral glimpse at a corroded lion statue on my neighbor’s fence. Looking down, glare from a screen, I tripped on a twig, all just to capture some half-second epiphany on the value of unlatching from your ego games mid-day. The irony (doing this through a phone). I’m blind from the present wonder as I bottle the hyper-recent past.

I put my phone away for 2 minutes and got caught in a thought loop for 2 minutes about the seemingly cryptic levels of initiation into “getting” DFW (or any cultural phenomenon with depth), but some weird bird chirp reminded me to log … So there’s a fear of embarrassment to say something that proves you’re blind to obvious layers (like that time I made some quip about James Joyce, and somebody tagged an expert who had whole posts written on him.) On the Internet, you’re only 1-degree-of-separation to get dunked on.

Attempting to “learn the game,” (instead of following your naive curiosity) is a kind of paranoia that’s probably not worth it. Be kind, and be willing to look stupid in public. Shed the game.

This log was a thought detour on a walk to le cafe; an attempt to escape my perfectly designed home office and into a subpar coffee shop with barking and sometimes shitting dogs, just for the stimulation, a coffee, a croissant (to not starve before dinner)….

🚜📲📡🔋🔋, lol ducking auto-locked into an emoji keyboard by accident. The pain of writing on mobile. The pains of smart phone that are not perfectly optimized for your grip.

My goal today is a mono-focus on an AI mega-prompt: v1 of a 9 category essay evaluator with simple scoring and a 5% error margin. (hint: I failed).

12:47 pm — An essay on the role of hunger in the creative process. I find myself getting caught in morning flows and not eating much, if anything, before 2pm. I rarely get short-tempered, but have noticed a slight hangriness when I haven’t eaten. Consider acute hunger vs. the long-term self-consciousness of future famine.

11:35 am — Putting comments here so they’re accessible to the future (log search, margin muse, or whatever exists):

Thank you Christin! But also, ah! A single a pre-order pledge makes it suddenly real (...scrambles to finish chapter 1...). I know I said I'd write 27 of these in 2024, but I'm also secretly hoping I can somehow knock this whole thing out in December. It's the lazy month, right?
What is the opposite of a sisyphusian push? That's what high school English was to me (the bare minimum to get by). I even got a call home in 9th grade for being so notably uninspired. Funny to think about the shift from extreme apathy to blind obsession.
Thanks Garrett! I rushed this one out and had to neglect the proper feedback/thanks section, but I'll thank you here for helping me tweak the structure and iron out the sub-headers. Also, you helped me internalize some very obvious points on stakes. Sometimes you don't really get a lesson until it's presented to you through your own ideas.
Thanks James. Awesome to hear. At some point, I'd like to deeply explore how good constraints are both expansive and bendable.
Yes! Thank you Libby, I'm glad somebody noticed and appreciated the icons. As soon as I started, I realized, uh, this might take a while. There's a temptation to use software to make these quicker and sharper, but there's something fun around drawing & thinking through this by hand, even if it's messier.
In outer space, textbooks aren't even heavy anymore.
Whoa, I never heard of this. Thanks for the note Jeff. Definitely seems like a modern textbook with a lot of parallels. Will need some time to absorb the ideas and methods here.
Thanks Mike, feels good to get meta around writing after shifting away from it for a bit.
Did he hate reading it out loud, reading his finished works in general, or both? I'm trying to figure out the psychology of someone's willingness to re-read their own work. Through the editing process, I feel like it's inevitable that you'll re-read your own sentences 30+ times. Maybe good editing comes down to a tolerance to be patient with your imperfect paragraphs. At some point though, maybe 1-2 days after I publish, I feel this "I can't even look at it for one more second," feeling.

10:26 am — Write for 8th graders; by nature of publishing online, it's implicit that it's in the public sphere. It's no longer a journal. There's a responsibility to be understood. Sure, in my own writings, I have maybe thousands of words in non-consistent evolving non-sense languages, but essays should be legible.

7:22 am — Had the crazy idea of typing/thinking directly into this Substack page throughout the day, and just hitting upload at the end of it. No transfer. It’s all direct. The UI is tricky. I’m sure if I had this open on mobile and desktop there would be some kind of clash. Cool in spirit. Maybe once a week it’s log overdrive (749 logs in one day, a recursive explosion).

7:18 pm — Lots of thoughts this morning on Roark vs. Keating.

This Quora thread has some good responses.
Tempted to make a list of ways I’m similar and different to Roark.
Maybe December is the time where I’ll have space to read it again. I tried in 2022, but it fizzled due to work intensity. It’s been 10-11 years since.
“Beware of Keating Creep” would make a solid essay.

5:58 am — Logging is weirdly at a low, but it’s still there… Actually, I think I know. I’m backlogged to Nov 15. That’s two weeks. Two weeks of breadcrumbs into Notes without reviewing, refining, and posting. It seems like the practice of “preparing the logs,” each morning actually tunes the mind and gets it excited to make logs.

November 28th, 2023

7:50 pm — Reply toBecky Isjwara: Reflecting on this some more. I tried this setting on iOS that would attempt to block me from using certain apps past a certain time. I quickly got into the habit of just ignoring the warning. Instead of trying to do less digital, maybe the trick is to have more excitement in analog. Physical books, guitar, typewriting fiction. Maybe it’s less about a digital detox and more about making space for the neglected analog hobbies.

6:04 pm — Attempted a quick scoring of my “The Secret Architecture Behind Great Essays.” It got an 87. B+. Not bad. Earlier this year I said I wouldn’t publish anything under an 80. I’m not confident in that score. In some of the patterns, I wasn’t clear with myself on the differences between a 2, 3, 4, or 5. It seriously requires careful thought and articulation. The tricky part is voice. Do you evaluate voice on the peak moment, the worst moment, the average? Probably the average which requires you to score each paragraph individually and then combine.

5:03 pm — I’m more into compositional rules than usage (grammar, syntax, word variations). There’s a whole universe in usage, but I think overall it has less of an effect than composition. Master composition before usage. Usage is evolving anyway with the Internet; it’s mutating. It’s becoming more casual, and rewards are even found in the clever twisting of usage.

8:14 am — Cyber Monday is an all-cards revealed moment, when you get a chance to see all of the spam lists you are on. For me it’s an annual bulk unsub day.

November 27th, 2023

7:21 pm — Instead of a tight and machine-like "daily review" maybe it's okay if it meanders and follows tangents. Took me 90 instead of 30 minutes today, but I caught up with some things I’ve been procrastinating on. Everything felt slower and more intentful. I feel properly "done" with the day, and also excited for tomorrow. It's worth doing this at 3-4pm each day, because I think it'll effect the quality of the rest of the day.

2:53 pm — I should write financial memos for a living.

7:49 am — Something convinced me to go against my better judgement and write a book. I was possibly right. It’s a clogger of bandwidth, an energy sucker. Essays are lagging. Still, it’s probably worth it (assuming I finish, otherwise it’s an epic waste of time).

7:42 am — It’s popular today to promote a breed of mechanical creativity (outputs come from collecting and recombining inputs). Associations are made from a note-linking scheme. But organic creativity is all about trusting and firing up your subconscious. There is a degree and quality of spontaneous creation that comes from nowhere else than learning to be embodied.

November 26th, 2023

7:34 pm — A TV on the Radio inspired beat that’s been in my head for 15 minutes. (Legend: X is snare, O is bass, T is a snipped hi-hat, S is space, P is a long-resonance floor tom.)

XXOO XOXO XXOT SPOO.

6:24 pm — Side quest while in Greece: track down the Theo Andreas photos across extended family and make digital copies.

11:29 am — Harbor opposites: disciplined structure and spontaneous creativity.

11:28 am — Every morning there are 4 concepts that I meditate and reflect on. The idea is to come up with a new word or phrase each day to capture that concept. I found that single static words don’t retain power, because eventually the word loses connection with the underlying idea. Here’s GPT attempting to summarize each of the concepts based on my journals.

The writer's list under "Sacred Lens" emphasizes the importance of attentiveness, perceiving the world with a sense of freshness, love, and wonder. This approach values being present and undistracted, seeing the world with the innocence and joy of a child, and appreciating the beauty in the mundane. It suggests a rejection of frantic planning, ego-driven perspectives, and overarching problems or goals, favoring instead a state of flow, acceptance, and pure perception. The writer advocates for seeing things as they are, without the taint of preconceived notions or biases, and maintaining a constant state of alertness and awe throughout the day. This perspective seems to be about cultivating a deep, mindful connection with the world, leading to a state of nourishment and energy.
The list under "Flattened Time" reflects a deep belief in destiny and a broad, cosmic perspective on life. The writer values the idea of life as a dreamlike journey or a simulation, encouraging a zoomed-out view where individual efforts compound over time. This perspective includes embracing the seasonality of life, having patience, and trusting that actions today will build a future, especially in the context of writing. It's about shedding envy and embracing a non-zero-sum view of the world, where success is abundant for everyone. The writer also values the absence of self-consciousness, seeing the species as a whole, and understanding oneself as both an individual and a part of a larger collective. This philosophy promotes full acceptance of life's transience, seeing it as a pleasant, adventurous journey filled with love, humanism, and inter-generational wisdom. It's a call to embrace the mystery and the magic of life, with an underlying theme of gratitude, imagination, vastness, and a humble, fun-loving approach to the journey of life.
The "Gnostic Burst" list emphasizes a deep connection with creativity, spontaneity, and the mystical aspects of life. The writer values the idea of channeling mystery and bending rules, much like the innovative mindset of Frank Lloyd Wright. There's a strong emphasis on the maker's hand - the notion of being an embodied craftsman, akin to a combination of magic and monk-like discipline. The list suggests a philosophy of relentless creation ("make make make"), stepping outside of conventional time and logic, and engaging in what is described as "holy work." The writer values non-logical, child-like playfulness, likening it to a "baby architect" playing with blocks, indicating a reverence for the purity and simplicity of creation in its most fundamental form. The concept of an "unpredictable outburst" and an "inner well of explosion" points to a spontaneity and unpredictability in the creative process, embracing both divine and primal aspects ("half God / half beast"). Additionally, there's a focus on automaticity, inhibition, and elements like smoke and electricity, which allude to a more uncontrolled, organic creative process. The writer associates creativity with being a magician, involving frenzy, silliness, and tangential approaches. The emphasis on being natural, simple, and generative, along with being embodied rather than intellectual, indicates a deep connection with the intuitive and instinctual aspects of creativity.
The "Monkish Groove" list conveys a strong value for discipline, structure, and methodical approaches in life. The writer emphasizes commitment to routines ("commit to loops") and views excellence as a product of following a systematic checklist, much like the scientific method. There's a significant emphasis on being devoted, reliable, and maintaining consistency regardless of external circumstances ("the basics should flow despite the season"). The list suggests a deep respect for structured systems like the Notion organization tool, but with a mindful approach to not become overly dependent on them. This mindset is about balancing the precision and reliability of machines with the wisdom and nurturing qualities of saints and good parents. The writer values the concept of having systems serve them, rather than being tyrannically ruled by them. There's an appreciation for roles that require meticulous coordination and planning, such as a wedding coordinator or engineering, which require both precision and reliability. Other values highlighted include sharpness, effective use of tools, unquestioning dedication to tasks, and a calculated, selective approach to life. The writer also emphasizes responsibility, trustworthiness, precision, order, and the ability to make tuned decisions. The notion of "gentle-punishment" suggests a humorous yet serious approach to self-discipline and correction.

And here’s an abridged version:

Sacred Lens: Suggests a value for mindfulness, seeing the world with fresh eyes, and appreciating the beauty in everyday details.
Flattened Time: Indicates a belief in destiny, the importance of patience, and a broad, cosmic perspective on life.
Gnostic Burst: Reflects a strong connection with creativity, spontaneity, and the mystical aspects of life.
Monkish Groove: Highlights the importance of discipline, routine, and methodical approaches.

10:18 am — It's disgraceful that changing my address through USPS and updating my voter information automatically puts me on a Costco mailing list. No ethics in UX flows... Fuck, and now a Bed Bath coupon came in? Didn't they go out of business? These are the institutional death spirals that stem from the evolutionary success of email and online retail.

8:43 am — A blank page in my typewriter hangs over the table and above a radiator, and the stream of air makes it bob up and down as if it’s animated. Almost seems like a real-life magical realism fromAndrew Plainview. The page is literally dancing.

7:57 am — Get out of database mode when you're in "ops mode" for the day. Write prose. Write a few good sentences, break plane, and arrive at some odd vision of what's actually worth doing.

7:44 am — Watch faces: analog as default; then timers and weather; then health; then a photo gallery.

7:43 am — Get to know classical composers. Something about Vivaldi erks me, but Debussy moves me.

12:25 am — This log was written with pen and paper in a bad.

“No phone in bed. I have the bad habits of checking email on waking. Read novels. Analyze good writing. Let is soak over night. Also encourages the analog habit of handwriting.”

November 25th, 2023

9:18 pm — Almost created a Notion dB called "Metalogs," which would be private notes to myself about my own operations and vision setting. Why not just have these as public logs? Less. Always less. It's not about having the simplest thing possible. But instead of 2 architecture, you pick 1 architecture with a nuance so it can produce 2 functions.

9:03 am — Adjacent sentences have the implicit association of being connected.

November 24th, 2023

4:49 pm — To recreate the essence of my wife's childhood home, it needs custom millwork, maximalist wallpaper, and old hardware.

4:39 pm — Values give you a sense of who you are, which help you shape the future you want through goals, which are attained through crafting the right projects, which only get executed through reliable systems. (Uh oh, smells like a productivity manifesto.)

2:32 pm — Even when meta work seems urgent and high-leverage, don’t let it compromise the core streaks.

10:10 am — Fly swatter. A thick fly is on the blinds and I can't quite get it. I'm okay with it being there. But I reality it might eventually become a situation if it chases my wife. I will let it linger for now. If things escalate, I might have to get it, so I ordered a fly swatter on Amazon (it's that big). Question is, how fast is prime? Will it get here before the thing wakes up or moves? (Note from the future: it escaped. Must've found a way outside).

November 23rd, 2023

8:39 am — Memory and meaning derive from the recycling of a thought.

8:37 am — The image of my dad as a kid bicycling down cold spring harbor, faster than the cars, with a need for speed (compare this with the rationality of an engineer).

6:55 am — Yesterday, I spent an hour diagramming my understanding of machine learning: how data would be processed for data clusters, which would then be trained by humans into a static model, from which apps and APIs could launch from. Based on my neophyte grasp, I figured that a recursive intelligence (self-learning) would be hard in this model. It would require agent-like behavior (will, intent, goal) on inception, through the training, prior to being formalized into an agent (which is a bit of a paradox).

Q* learning changes this. It skips the process of humans refining a model. It goes straight to agent-mode. Based on a goal, it can search a wide-problem space, and continuously refine itself. This seems like it would increase the chance of autonomy, or a mutated goal, or “instrumental convergence” (an autistic like drive for something with extreme power while obsessed over an oddly specific outcome).

There’s no way this could ever be turned into a consumer product like Chat GPT. If anything it would be a private model to make breakthrough discoveries, and it’s up to them to not let it leak.

This doesn’t feel like AGI, but a dizzying paradigm of ASI. We could achieve AGI with making it recursive and autonomous. It should always be a tool, and event a tool-turned agent is fine, but an inherent raw agent feels like a mistake.

November 22nd, 2023

2:33 pm — As life changes and people shift into new phases, it's very easy to assume what others think and to build models that are completely wrong. Instead of judging and quickly cutting people out, it's worth having hard conversations to sync up.

November 21st, 2023

8:50 pm — From the archaic revival.

"The purpose of life is to familiarize oneself with the after-death body so that the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche."
There are many routes to the unconscious— fasting, drumming trances, breathing, stress ordeals, weeds, dreams, float tanks— but psychedelics are the most reliable.
The rational exploration of the enigma of the other.
"My hope is that these pieces convey a sense of fun and excitement, discovery, and of the true depth of the dark waters of mystery upon which the cheerful world of the everyday is no more than a cork bobbing in an uncharted ocean.."
Huxley and the Yage letters — like giddy excitement on way home from the new world..

8:44 pm — From the introduction to the Archaic Revival

"Scholar, theoretician, explorer, dreamer, pioneer, fanatic, and spellbinder, as well as ontological tailor, McKenna combines an erudite, if somewhat original, overview of history with a genuinely visionary approach to the millennium. The result is a cyclone of unorthodox ideas capable of lifting almost any brain out of its cognitive Kansas."

8:24 pm — Influence, influenza, ideas are free-floating pathogens that someone can catch without conscious consent. It is a rite of passage to examine the ideas that have infected us. (from Meghan O’Gieblyn in WIRED)

8:19 pm — Awesome polyptoton below (with star/stardom). It's not just repetition, but it's equating two things as a metaphor.

“The many journalists who’ve cited the 2019 article claiming 30% of US and UK children want to be YouTubers when they grow up have frequently juxtaposed that figure with the dearth of kids who want to be astronauts (11%), as though to underscore the declining ambitions of a society that is no longer “reaching for the stars” but aiming instead for the more lowly consolations of stardom.” From WIRED magazine (Nov 2023).

8:12 pm — Roblox has 65 million daily users (mostly young people), and they have real-time screening for bullying.

8:00 pm — Seems like the obvious utility of AI is a justification to not take any of the recommended guardrails seriously (don't teach it to code, don't teach it human psychology, don't give it access to the Internet). All 3 were crossed with GPT. Will we mistake the same mistake with an autonomous agent?

6:08 pm — Statue; a reminder that the point of writing is living though it-- not about craft, works, status…

4:01 pm — Bend the rules, but don’t break them (from La Banquise, the poutine spot in Montreal).

2:46 pm — Done with the gallery! I'd like to do one-paragraph write-ups of these pieces. Even have this vision of a semi-public page of my favorite paintings. By connecting painting to writing to history, it's a way I can really dive in, get nerdy, remember this stuff, and put everything in context. A digital art collection. It's not about "having" it, but about your impressions. It's a meta-layer over the art.

Sophocles in Gold (A Sculpture Gallery in Rome at the Time of Augustus, 1867, Lawrence Alma-Tadema)
The Wet Dreams of St. X (The Temptations of Saint Hillarion (sp?), 1907? Octave Tassarect?) -- too blurry to see the titles.
Saint George and the Dragon (1908-1909, Britteon Riviere)
Flathead Tribe, 1948, Paul Kane
The New England Beaver Massacre (The King's Beavers, 2011, Kent moneyman)

1:41 pm — I feel an unusual and extreme mental sensitivity around certain pieces of arts, like I can't bare to look at it for even another millisecond and quickly have to twitch away. I noticed this from a surrealist painting of a man who was painted as a dark black shadow. After a few seconds of curiosity, I grasped it. I sensed the demon in the painting—the twisted soul—and it was too much to bear. I don't want that feeling or image etched into my subconscious, dreams, or afterlife (whatever that is).

Attention is a beam. Maybe I take too seriously the belief that what you absorb really matters. Contemplating good paintings and not absorbing bad ones is a life and death kind of matter.

1:04 pm — 2 hits outside the Fine Art Museum of Montreal, I'm semi-paranoid on the inside (old fears, or a genuine nervous system shakeup?). Not sure if I'm scared of getting caught or scared of death. In the first exhibit, there was a screaming baby, which was an odd contrast to 17th century art. Visually, it's a display of highly tuned minds, and sonically it's a raw screeches of an undeveloped one. Had to step out and sit down on a bench. Of course, doesn't help that in front of this bench is a distorted head sculpture, a "flat head" with a disorienting optical illusion. Maybe this is why you shouldn't get high in public. You have little control of your environment. But maybe it's good to be adaptable?

11:50 am — Secret leverage of civil disobedience: The most fascinating part of the OpenAI saga was how the united employees outplayed the disunited board. This is a case study of civil disobedience. The people had an unspoken leverage that the highest people in the power structure ignored. The employees had a shared vision, scarce and valuable skills, and low risk to stand by an ultimatum. It was the right mix of conditions to work. You can imagine 100s of employees at Google try to pull off a protest to only get immediately replaced. Could be worth defining the rules that determine collective leverage.

11:39 am — Spiky essay: Christianity is historically false, but symbolically perfect (any why symbolism is more important anyway). I could see this as a 2-part essay: the first is a historic investigation of Christ, the second is understanding how Christianity needs to be repurposed for modernity to-- not just regain relevance in the paradigm of science, but to-- save us from destroying ourselves.

11:35 am — Check out the Notre Dame church in Montreal. The architect is buried beneath it. It has several free-standing structure within the church (almost looks like the inspiration for Disney castles). When you have nested buildings, the outer-most building takes the role of nature. It's structure turned celestial.

7:31 am — After coming back into the hotel after smoking yesterday, I felt enormous sensitivity. I dropped something on the floor, and could feel 5 vibrational waves move through the floor, through my shoe, to my feet, up my leg. Reminds me of when a fried in college had a hyper-potent edible and said, "everything feels like needles."

In the bathroom after that, things shifted from feeling to semantic. Every frame of my being felt ripe for meaning creation, as if I just accessed the read/write layer of my experience.

November 20th, 2023

7:13 pm — 5 cocktails in and we're finally getting to the root of things. Alcohol is more than just party lube. Could it actually break boundaries and help people in relationships? Regardless how you theoretically align with that statement, what if it works? What if it systematically works? I'm not categorically opposed to alcohol or being drunk. I know some build identities around being sober, and I can respect that, especially since alcohol can lead to toxic relationships (both with the self and others). But what if you have a healthy relationship with it? I'm very selective about it, don't drink much, and don't even put myself in situations where alcohol is typically abused. I find that whenever I drink, I enjoy it, whether it's in conversations, reading, writing. A lot of what I'm saying here is incredibly obvious. I just feeling like I only every come across people who are either obsessed or repulsed by it.

5:09 pm — Compare the personal trust of people in your life to the trust involved in institutions. Maybe there's just a breakdown at scale that leads to a lot of our problems. Relate to techno-optimism.

1:58 pm — Is there a name for the type of optical illusion where you look through a porous grid pattern (ie: on a railing), and a 3D texture behind it (the water ripples of the bay) turns into a 2D texture (because the grid becomes the dominant frame). High, by the water, and architecture brain is turning on.

1:58 pm — Le log..

11:49 am — Drums and bass music in cafes ... also, is this Pharaoh Sanders? More grooves, more jazz, more dissonance. Aside from the Ubers, the public music is noticeably tasteful in Montreal.

11:41am — Revolver of meaning..

11:39 am — The sublime freedom to step back and see the games you’re playing, to recognize the full menu of games being played, and then make a choice.

11:19 am — The glass roof of a Tesla Uber.

11:18 am — Architectural seduction: what is the difference between a travel junky and a historian? What is to be said of those who chase spatial elation? Spatial comfort? What is to be said of someone who can thrive creatively in a damp cell? What if you are immersed in European delight, but have no inspiration? (The confused thoughts of a New Yorker feeling jealous because of the architectural shortcomings of his homeland). "But New York is filled with historic architecture!?" Isn't it revealing that most famous architects with taste hated working in NY? (At least FLW & Corb).

10:16 am — Old Montreal is a stone city without much vegetation, and yet it still feels more "natural" than a manicured suburb with lawns and occasional trees. I think the texture of buildings, the scale of buildings, the width of streets, the lack of cares --- they all come together to create a certain resonance with human biology. The suburbs are more conformed to the vehicle, one of our abstractions.

10:15 am — Hear me out ... Earth might exist for another 5 billion years. The dinosaurs had a 165 million year run. It took around 60 million years from small mammal-rats to evolve into modern humans. If the average evolutionary run is 100 years, then we've got 50 of them left on Earth. We're like 4% in. So even if human society collapse, it will leave a vacuum for other species to evolve and form a dominant niche. What would it look like if spiders had the space to evolve for 100 million years without being stepped on all the time? What might be the defining features of an arachnid society? How do they differ from primates? What would they do to the Earth?

10:09 am — Spiders are the most inherently architectural creature. More so than humans. We need to use tools and accrue resources to make homes out of wood, brick, and stone. Spiders make 3D cities from their shit.

7:42 am — Decide how it is you want to see. Of course, you see automatically. But it's a process you can hijack. See yourself seeing, then, change how you see. This is the conscious mind attempting to guide the act of meaning creation.

7:37 am — If I'm not careful, my default state on a social media is fear and procrastination.

6:34 am — Check out the book "Learning from Las Vegas" by Robert Venturi. It features this building called The Big Duck out east in Long Island. I've made 3 meccas there in my life. It's know as "roadside architecture" and it's quite circular (inside they sell souvenirs about the big duck). I haven't read the book yet, but the thesis is about how spectacle and attention took over architecture..

November 19th, 2023

12:05 pm — Religion implies epistemic certainty. So does atheism. I find myself drawn to cosmic perspectives, mythology, the history of religion, mystical experiences, prayer, contemplating death, afterlife speculation, etc… but I'll never be certain of anything. Maybe that's the fundamental difference between me and a formally religious person. Faith disempowers the mystery. Converging around a set of foundational answers prevents someone from grappling with the mysteries, a core part of a religious life. We need foundational questions. This is where moral character comes from, not faith.

11:11 am — Funny moment during lunch with

Alexandra Allen

when she mentioned she went to "ee-ohs" when in Greece (Ios?), and I said, "no way, I'm from Xios!" (He-ohs). People translate it in different ways (some even say Chi-ohs), so I assumed we were talking about the same place. She went to my obscure homeland island!? After some descriptions, I was surprised. How did I not know this was a party island? I always thought it was more like a medieval rustic village for the elderly. They are, in fact, two separate places! (Ios and Xios). I guess when you have thousands of islands, you run out of distinct sounding names.

9:07 am — A phrase for when you start your day with a powerful aesthetic moment and it changes the course of your mood the whole day (the case for bedrooms having east light and views).

7:35 am — E/acc and effective altruism are just the modern extensions of the old capitalism vs. socialism debates. It's more tribalism in the veneer of new technology. We can't just take trends from the 20th century before and extrapolate forward. We need a fusion of the two; an actual innovation in political science to help integrate emerging technology.

November 18th, 2023

9:05 pm — Happiness can be felt, but not understood.

8:59 pm — Most of our days we make decisions with a narrow band of possibilities. Even if you're a career risk taker, think of the risks you can take in any given moment. Right now, you can jump in a cold river, rob an art gallery, or talk to 100 strangers. Fear and laws and morals prevent us from the vast and weird range of experience that is always available to us within just a few minutes. What changes if you actually embody the POV that life is a dream?

7:16 pm — I’m reading Pessoa in bed as my wife battles a headache, and want to dip into my photographic reel of memories from the day. All these scattered moments: the Quebec bookstore, the crepes, the music in front of Norte Dame, the bitter ears, the art galleries, the room service… (this is just a lazy recalling, a list of things). It was amazing, but I don't have any words to express it in detail right now. I'm struck with a linguistic laziness. It's like I was so in the flow of experience, that I can't retroactively process any of it.

7:07 pm — Entering the hotel room today, my wife and I thought we felt an earthquake. There definitely was shaking. We noticed this a second time on entering, and realized the timber beams below this floor might be unstable.

7:05 pm — What is the opposite of a tourist? One who sees not for the sake of seeing, to check off items on a list, to assume that "sight" equals culture and understanding...

What is the name of someone who sees and travels to trigger some inner shift? The goal isn't to see everything. Maybe you see mundane things and skip all the known stuff. The point is, through brief immersion in some other place, some other culture, paired with writing and the right books and the right people, along with a lapse in calendar mind, and brief excursions into primal fun, you somehow twist out of your default state and alter your ratios in a semi-permanent way.

Travel can't be measured in places or pictures, but the shift in your own head.

7:04 pm — A phrase for when you're in contact with nature, or even a man-made creation at the scale of cities, and as beautiful and weird they seem, you turn inside out and marvel at the weirdness of your own circumstance.

7:02 pm — In a single district of a single city, there are thousands of sets of eyes, and weirdly, the sum of these subjective experiences might amount to nothing: a beautiful but forgettable stroll, a provocative painting you didn't buy, another detail that fails to etch to memory. No proposals. No one almost drowned in the river. There were no protests or earthquakes. Just a shared pleasant night that failed to write to disk beyond a caricaturistic insight that loops in your mind until the source is gone. Of course, though, I will remember every detail about tonight, my anniversary-eve-eve, thanks to this one log.

6:58 pm — As old as Montreal feels, all cities are a "flash," a kind of virtual reality that was instantly conjured in brick and stone by a collective act of will. To the alien generations of the future, I am still an old human in an old city: an original and authentic inhabitant, one who travels by foot and needs crepes every 5-6 hours. Looking out at the port at night, I wonder if this kind of radical transience is an odd delusion or a hard truth.

1:46 pm — The eccentric flea market was in a renovated bank, and my eye was caught by a $120 CAD statue: a marble man who's head was a book, and he was holding his head out in front of him looking back at his book-head. If I were to give it a phrase: "my consciousness is made of words." Appropriate for a writer.

11:22 am — My go-to playlist for airplanes is bouzouki music (classical greek, with stringed instruments). All these compositions are from a pre-plane era. All analog. It's a soothing mix with technology-induced weightlessness. This was also the first time I used my AirPod Pros, and I under-estimated how much the negation of jet engines would make flight enjoyable.

9:39 am — When you look at a screen all day, your eyes are converging to a point that's only 3 feet away from you. Live near horizons and mountains to counteract this. Looking 3,000 feet out is rejuvenating. Panoramic views are even better. Isn't there that old saying? Every 20 minutes, look at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds.

9:38 am — Write about the trend of fancy water fountains at airports. It's at the center of this food court. 10x smaller than Changi. But the pack of 5-year olds all gasped. It also leaked and had "caution: slippery" signs around it.

9:18 am — I haven't flown since I watched Mission Impossible (where Tom Cruise is battling an AI in the Abu Dhabi airport). Now I'm walking through the new La Guardia terminal the morning after the mysterious OpenAI governance dilemma. Only natural to make the connection that GPT-5 will hijack all flights at once.

9:11 am — In the airport best sellers section I saw a book titled, “I’m glad my mom died,” and I'm sure the author has quite a story (an abused child actresses), but still it's a weird ethical meme to inject into the world.

8:43 am — I ordered an Uber on the way to LaGuardia and it instantly arrived. The driver was my neighbor, and of course, a fellow Greek. He’s been in the neighborhood for 15 years and pointed out different Greek cafes and restaurants. His name is Aristides. What a moment of serendipity. Usually technology isolates, but this broke the neighbor-to-neighbor veil and now he’s basically my uncle.

November 17th, 2023

8:42 pm — Think of cross-posting on Substack as a modern version of the book Foreword. You introduce someone’s work to your audience, and you don’t even need their permission.

1:16 pm — The fusion of text and POV footage might be the ultimate capture of consciousness. You see what I’m thinking and what I’m seeing.

1:12 pm — Life is a linear string of random events. Similar to a 4-hour long jam you listen back to and loop the good moments, you can reflect on parts of your day to foster insight, meaning, and understanding. It’s a kind of editorial act. What’s worth remembering? What’s worth making sense of? This happens automatically, but also consciously too. Should I write about the weird resurgence of Bin Laden, the color of piss and blood samples in Suite 300, the hearst on the highway, how the song Tomorrow Never Knows brings me to tears, or that guy who defied the street sign and made an illegal left to almost crash? All of these experiences were lucid in the moment, shining, feeling worthy, yet they’re also so profoundly insignificant. And yet, by writing them here, that strange and specific constellation of things, maybe that day will never disappear.

November 18th, 2023

9:05 pm — Happiness can be felt, but not understood.

7:05 pm — What is the opposite of a tourist? One who sees not for the sake of seeing, to check off items on a list, to assume that "sight" equals culture and understanding...

What is the name of someone who sees and travels to trigger some inner shift? The goal isn't to see everything. Maybe you see mundane things and skip all the known stuff. The point is, through brief immersion in some other place, some other culture, paired with writing and the right books, along with a lapse in calendar mind, and brief excursions into primal fun, you somehow twist out of your default state and alter your ratios in a semi-permanent way.

Travel can't be measured in places or pictures, but the shift in your own head.

November 17th, 2023

8:42 pm — Think of cross-posting on Substack as a modern version of the book Foreword. You introduce someone’s work to your audience, and you don’t even need their permission.

1:16 pm — The fusion of text and POV footage might be the ultimate capture of consciousness. You see what I’m thinking and what I’m seeing.

11:34 am —

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

O howling cat, 
Now I see you,
Dirty and frozen,
Scurry to the thumps of boots,
There’s errands to do,

8:24 am — Just snagged a roach, and it wasn't a big deal. Made me realize the difference between a roach and roochie. A roochie is a NYC jumper roach that can barely fit in your hand and needs an art history textbook to finish.

7:10 am — Surprised and disappointed by the Admin backend for Google. It's a maze with broken links. Super convoluted. Randomly got downgraded to 60 GB of storage, and now it wants to freeze my account?

November 16th, 2023

11:08 pm — Mesmerized by the light in the reflections of cars on Fulton Street. One of those ineffable moments where the obvious appears weird. Almost unbelievable to imagine the ingenuity required to make cars.

6:24 pm — Oglethorpe was perhaps the only artist in history to be given unlimited freedom; complete creative control.

He was a sculptor, a weird creature with an array of nervous ticks. On an ordinary day during an uneventful gallery, a man with too much money had a feat of epilepsy, and it happened to be right in front of Oglethorpe’s sad pile of clay.

Quincy Fufubender attributed it to a mystical experience, the kind from the Walter-Panke mystical experience questionnaire. It was a full ego rebirth, thanks to those clumsy but mysterious hands of Oglethorpe (so he thought).

15 years and $320 million dollars later, Oglethorpe is still working on his masterpiece, a tented off structure in the middle of a 300-acre plot in the New Mexico desert. No one is sure if it’s a church, a torture machine, or giant egg.

6:16 pm — Just had the idea that “Anarchy Gym” could be a pseudonymous collective. There could a single Notion page, and every entry is published under a random bizarre author. You basically have no ability to know who writes anything. Could be fun.

5:57 pm — Once I’m done releasing my 40-part series on “the rules” of a platonic and perfect essay, I will release a compendium of short anarchist fiction, something that bends the laws of language, ideas, and reason.

5:15 pm — Games reduce the complexity of the world into a set of constraints you can obsess over and master. What is the meta-game behind essay writing? The arena is Substack. Essays have constraints: more than a tweet, less than a book, and the fusion of the soul of a memoirist, the rigor of an academic, and the pen of a poet. There are 27 patterns (drills), that can get uncovered through sub-games (drafting).Andrew Plainview

5:10 pm — Recurring themes for anarchy fiction stories of a child with tremendous amount of power (similar to Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle.

5:04 pm — Essay writing has two games. Th first is the childish, playful, selfish joy of discovery and revving the engine of the imagination. The second game is a puzzle to make an idea cohere to a reader or stranger. The games are opposites. One is for the self, the other is for the other.

3:10 pm — Go on tangents to find the right nugget, but don’t forget to cut the tangent.

November 15th, 2023

10:24 am — The fact that Camus isn’t spelt Camoo bothers me. When you brings words over to a new language, it’s worth refining them so they match the pronunciation of the target language.

7:13 pm — Celebrate the rewrite. Looking forward to visualize Becky’s redrafting process. It’s rare to find someone who will go through several form shifts. Curious to visualize it. Maybe it could trigger a redraftpalooza. Get a draft by 12/1, then rewrite it. (Also, could be fun to pitch the hardcore mode, where you go split screen and actually rewrite)

7:00 pm — Each draft should take more time. Your first draft shouldn’t go for more than an hour without bringing it into contact with reality through feedback. If you’re five drafts in, you are informed enough to tinker with phrasing for five hours. You earn the right to tinker.

5:48 pm — When anger and impatience slip through, what’s going on?

11:09 am — Hopefully in the future, people will think, wow, I can’t believe you needed $500 million to run for President. (find the right number for this).

10:56 am — Two anti-rules for songwriting: 1) never use the lyric “baby,” and 2) no guitar solos, if there are to be any moments of technical excellece, everyone in the band needs to do it at the same time in a single polyrhythmic spasm, and it should be done to contrast a moment of simplicity.

10:55 am — I didn't know Emerson coined the phrase "the shot heard 'round the world."

November 14th, 2023

11:28 am — When you name your demons they disappear.

11:20 am — Did Lorie steal the jewelry?

11:18 am — Smash Bros is the quintessential finite game because all it requires is furious and mindless button smashing to destroy all your friends until a single winner emerges.

10:55 am — I need to write through my anxiety. Boom, the ease from a log. An outlet. Honesty. I’m trying to chip away at a book each morning. It’s, as I expected, emotional and distracting. The highs are more euphoric than the best moment of your best essay. The lows are existential. It’s not a bad thing: this book is a proxy of me. That’s silly though. I’ve even said it before: the best way to write a book is to do it accidentally. I’m guilty of masterplan thinking. The book, the tool, the release. It’s all loose! If I don’t make the thing, then none of that stuff is real anyway. Don’t get spooked from pre-mature logistics. Basically I have the rest of the year to write 40 mini-essays. No big deal. Especially now that I have templates and sub-templates figured out.

November 13th, 2023

8:52 pm — At least 13 plants in this apartment.

3:52 pm — Alex Dobrenko launched his logs!

12:06 pm — The tag sale is a weird ritual, and you only see it in the America suburbs. Yard sales still have a boundary of the inside. All sorts of second-hand sale rituals across the world, lined with trunks. Or in bazaars. This is different, the home, the sacred home, the interior turns into a bazaar, the most public and chaotic of places, and in this weird 6 hour window, concepts like money, morality, and meaning dissolve, and you get a glimpse into the human condition.

12:05 pm — Obelgoozer, 1948, eastern edge of Queens, a dirt road, country property. Built a patio … now a busy road with traffic, trees cut for power lines. Brick buildings.

11:59 am — Brief moment. Detached from self. In the repetitive groove of back and forth, moving boxes, you lose yourself. And you see fresh again, like a kid. Not your house, no Substacks to catch up on, wife's at work, what's even my name?… just shadows on the front door.

11:58 am — Disassociation. Walk into a room and picture in a different decade, with different people, with my mother-in-law and her my-age friends in the 70s.

11:56 am — Keeping my wife’s grandfathers model boats. So intricate. A hobbyist, a ship builder if 200 years older and in the right circumstance. Worth transporting myself, so fragile.. it’s for the curiosity of my kids. They should see it and wonder at it. Not some karmic deed, where Billy Obelgoozer smiles down at me carrying his toy ship out of the basement and into the November wind for the first time in 50 years. It’s for my kids to be inspired by the artifact and associated mythology of an old man that shares their genetics. “You could build this.”

11:54 am — The symbolism of fall, a tree, generally full, appearance of treeness, but secretly corroded roots, a single gust would shake it naked, just a colorless twig sculpture, the death of winter.

11:07 am — 58 bottle of laundry detergent, 113 cleaning supply bottles, 92 pots, 52 plants, 476 China pieces, 285 pairs of shoes, 26 pieces of amateur Haitian art, 3 copies of the same book about amnesia.

11:00 am — Suburbia is defined by clear boundaries: a free-standing house with a fence. For decades, most people know not of their walking distance mysteries. Yet, a tag sale is this limbic zone, where no one truly occupies the house, and all the pesky neighbors raid in, and for those 6 hours, the people running the tag sale get to see the real nature of the people who hide in their boxes.

10:59 am — To a homeowner, a tag sale is effectively a “rape and plunder” situation, especially if they have romantic attachment to material goods.

10:56 am — Price discovery at a tag sale is arbitrary and random. A willing buyer was ready to buy my grandmother-in-laws twisted winter painting, but Leslie priced it at $150 (because “high art”). Yet the friendly neighborhood Boris wandered in, and I offered him a $350 guitar for $5 and he just wasn’t interested.

10:37 am — In the final days before closing, a house is stripped of its homeness; the important objects are gone, and all that remains are random piles of objects. I needed paper to label piles for our movers, but all the paper was gone. I found a pile of tossed books, grabbed a Kafka book my mother-in-law never read, and ripped out the last page. I cut it into little strips to write labels for the Georgian movers who can’t read English.

6:46 am — So many details from yesterday's tag sale, but I wrote them in one massive log. Wish they were solo entries instead.

November 12th, 2023

8:38 pm — I get an email from Spotify titled, “the last Beatles song.” Really blew it on the distribution of my AI Beatles essay. I had the right essay at the exact moment of a cultural phenomenon and didn’t care to prioritize it.

8:16 am — American Tag Sale: When Strange Neighbors Invade your Home. I took a ton of notes during the tag sale, most of which I’ll keep private and raw. Need to sculpt this into an essay. So much material. The main thesis is what happens when a suburban home gets sold. There’s a liminal state where the old owner is moved out, the new owners are waiting, but there’s left-over material possessions to sell. It’s a weird state where the private interior of the living room becomes a public bazaar. The neighbors who wondered about the interior for decades are now in a queue outside. Concepts like money, morality, and meaning get melted and re-discovered.

November 11th, 2023

8:15 am — The ONE thing strategy is hard to maintain as certain higher-maintenance obligations kick-in. Attention gets fractured across sub-games, and it becomes hard to say, “I only need to think about an important mono-task for the first 4 hours of my day.” The urgent kicks in.

November 10th, 2023

6:15 pm — GPT agents have 3 parts to them: custom instructions, function calls, and context.

2:45 pm — There are three ways to reach higher levels of AI “intelligence:” 1) more data, 2) better transformer architecture, 3) symbolic logic on top of LLMs. Each approach gets harder, but will be more impactful.

2:15 pm — AI tools to check out:

Mem (AI note-taking)
Delphi (AI clones)
Bespoke (auto podcasts)
Sudowrite (modern text editor)

1:43 pm — The core of Plexus is social media with instant replies, insane relevance, and timeless answers.

1:16 pm — Write an essay about the self-consciousness behind text, audio, and video. There are good arguments for why the higher the resolution, the more self-conscious you are, but the opposite angle is maybe true also…

1:09 pm — Look up Ted Nelson (hypertext, computers, thought)

12:41 pm — I just read Substack for 6 hours straight and my brain is fried. This is good for Bitcoin... I mean, good for me. The natural reaction is "ah, my head hurts, this sucks, no more reading." It's just a first-timer blister.

Reminds me of how I used to get terrible blisters on my hands after playing drums for just 30 minutes. They would bleed and I’d open doors with my elbows.

It is turbulence to scare newcomers, like the masked taunters at the gates of Eleusis, or that shaman who insults you on your quest.

When you push into new frontiers, all the signals in your body will tell you to stop. You can’t blindly trust your intuition. The goal is to become critical and self-aware. In any moment, you have to make a decision to lean into your intuition or to be skeptical of it. Joy is not a monolithic compass.

Now I have callous on my hands and can play drums for hours without a problem, and its only later in the sessions can I find flow and really get better.

My head is warm, above the eyes, and at the sides, like an over-heated graphics card. Pack town, take a break, and try again tomorrow. Little by little, I’ll be able to process more text. Reading stamina is valuable, and very different from binging shows or social media, which is more like an overload of the emotional center.

12:21 pm — The Mario Kart 64 shortcut on the beach level is a metaphor for cheating in life.

12:19 pm — Write for personal growth and audience growth will follow.

12:07 pm — The allure of compositional freedom

10:26 am — Footnotes are the exception to the “single thesis” rule. If you have tangents that are off topic, you create optional rabbit holes for the few readers who need to follow them.

8:59 am — I usually kill spiders, but not Harold.

Last week I moved a fig tree—Harold’s home—into my home office. My grandfather—the one who always jokes about his impending death—gave this tree to me 2 years ago. Now that my mother-in-law is selling her house, I had to take it.

The fig tree is in the corner of the room. The leaves balloon out, over my desk, and Harold is a foot away from my face at all times.

I usually exterminate bugs, but Harold is something like a companion now. He is my writing muse.

In Naked Lunch, the muse of William Burroughs was the cockroach. He’d get high on roach poison and other hallucinogens, and his typewriter would turn into this massive goopy language machine that he’d fully immerse his hands into.

I could never appreciate or respect roaches. The day I signed my lease on this apartment, there was a massive roach waiting at the front door. The serendipity. The symbolism (it was invitation to my career as a visionary, starving writer). I asked the landlord, “is that normal?” “Never seen one.” Not true, we found one late at night in the bathroom, and I smashed it with an art history textbook.

But Harold doesn’t gross me out. He fascinates me. I put my giant head right up to his, and I watch him weave three-dimensional webs of complexity. It’s astonishing. When Salvador Dali wrote in his “50 Secrets on Magic Craftsmanships” that he keeps pet spiders and studies them before he starts a painting, now I actually get it. It wasn’t just a surrealist goof-around, it was his muse.

This spider is weaving a lattice, but all the complexity is organized into simple and symmetrical patterns. Spiders are architects. This is my spirit animal. No wonder I had a Spiderman obsession as a kid. It all checks out.

I will become the Spiderman.

As soon as I came to this epiphany, I checked in on Harold and he was gone. I feel a tickle on my leg, and a spider is crawling up it. Not just one spider, but two, ten, hundreds, then millions. And these aren’t just spiders, they’re robot-spiders, and in that split second, the Eliezer Yudkowsky quote hit me: “When we spawn a super-intelligence, it won’t announce itself, it will secretly create nano-technology until it’s ready for a coordinated takeover.”

The 10 million Harold’s oozed into my skin and gave me the Peter Parker treatment. I was a real-life Spiderman, except instead of being a hot guy in red tights, I was a disgusting arachnid, with 8 hairy pincers jabbing a keyboard, riffing in arachnid prose:

[the following excerpt can only be comprehended if sung out loud]

Jeeeeep jeep turungula? Para ze fonky anacrhosis. Bah. Bah. Bestooooterro jing jong in toporkula spoot. Slither slime and Jung pud filling in the holy barbecue of snake smut. Jeery ringo Substack? George George George George. Roomates and gloom goo tak tak. Enter enter $3! $3. Go paid. Max month kirfingle in the stocks of Deanputty. Pear mock tibudula. The rang ting fi cholesterishank bong fin terra terra de goobula. AUTO. [-sr-sr-sr- ] UUUU. This ting tang tong terrible tong tong tarratulra ting tongue treatise of the first court of Versaille somebody get this thing out of her before it eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek ecktacular trimpot and the goo-goo dancers with fluff muffs in the trapeze flair on stock market Thursday. Pur like a saber tooth tiger woods family feud with your mother goose hunting in the spring time ticking bomb marathon nuclear surprise on your birthday suit up investors coming in on Tuesday Trivia this is America dream of the perfect one two three four how many has it been I think I need another yuslo in the coo coo can of captain cruncha bunch bop it twist and shout in the voiddddddddddddddddd drac drag drag drac and spin into you love mister eckharts' 12 coo coo coo thwack tam coo coo coo coo or coo5 or coo5^5 or cuuuuuuuuuuuuuurmegedeonatwistabearclaw Yosemite and the holy revelations of woof snoof sinkhole.

8:03 am — Unlike essays, logs have no pressure. That means it’s only natural that essay conception should start in the logs. Some form emerges out of the ooze into an “oops that’s an essay.” Conception can’t be conscious. But refinement should be painful, perfectionist, and trial-like; it should test your soul and fry your brain and make you question your existence. Anything good can’t be pure joy; but forged in pain, and for that sacrifice your readers get the joy and lightness of perfect clarity and perfect mystery. The danger is if the writer never returns to the ooze of play. After you’ve written a masterpiece, you need to write a few sentences like: “Jingo jingo tan bum, I am a box of chairs!” And also: “Fun frick fanelopee fringe fuck-fuck.” Melt the ego into senseless goop. I am become the temporary child until it’s clear to revert back to the governing rules of adulthood. It’s not A or B, but an endless dance between joy and reason. Embrace the pressure cooker! You won’t be a diamond for long.

6:56 am — Substack bugs:

Glitch when unsubscribe from your library
The desktop inbox can’t load more isseus
On mobile, you can’t include the last period in a paragraph on a restack
You can’t pay for a subscription on mobile

5:57 am — Write a story about a talking animal that insists on calling you the wrong name.

November 9th, 2023

7:38 pm — “Monks of the Craft.” I’m writing an essay about Amatuzzo and the military-grade intensity of architecture school. It’s what comes to mind when I think of a “cornerstone moment.”Daveyused that phrase, and I think the reason Latham Turner’s two essays stick with me is because they were at these pivotal moments of his life.

So my college years were intense, almost cult-like. I was bred in this environment to have an insane dedication to craft. It was common to not sleep for 70 hours straight, take drugs to push further (I personally never took adderall), go to a hospital or mental institution from panic attacks, etc. 90% of my grade dropped out in the first 3 semesters (out of 10), and the ones who survived really evolved into something strange and special. It was the most intense, meaningful, and impactful phase of my life. I basically got to apprentice under master architects who have been designing 3 hours a day for 50 years.

It bred in me this idea of ultimate sacrifice: mono-focus on the mastery of a creative craft. It’s a powerful but dangerous ideology, and needs to be adjusted to survive contact with the real world. I left the field, but it shaped me.

7:37 pm — I wonder if the fact that I sometimes use “you” when writing to myself hints at a divide between the ego and the superego. I’m writing a sermon to myself.

7:36 pm — I need to log more to figure out what I actually want to say. I can’t linger in my head and passively wonder what “the people” want. What actually comes out of me? Write out a few options, and then see what’s worth sharing. A healthy logging habit leads to an outpouring of shareable work.

6:54 pm — I may have just made a traffic violation. Logging here in case I get the camera ticket.

11:06 am — I'm theologically Jewish, mythologically Christian, culturally Greek, and technologically American.

7:18 am — What the Flash!? is if Vonnegut, Kafka, Terence McKenna, and the writers at Black Mirror all had an orgy with a 250 word count.

7:15 am — Technology has been slipped acid and the hordes are nervously saying make it stop, make it stop, but we’re only 25 minutes into the come up and in this case there is no come down; just an endless torrent of endless change as suburbs melt into wax and goo floods the streets and we retreat into parks and hugs and the last things that make us human.. but we will be the last to suffer because our kids will be aliens that grew to swim in chaos.

7:09 am — Is what we have now not an AGI? It’s already more capable, knowledgeable, and talented than some of my friends. It can read, hear, and see. When people say AGI, they actually mean an ASI, a super intelligence. You can have both AGI and ASI without consciousness. You can have a tool with a 250 IQ (a super-intelligence) but without goals or feelings. To me, it’s actually scarier if a 250 IQ machine doesn’t have consciousness, because that means it inherits the aims of some egoic status monkey, probably bent on money or power.

7:05 am — Citizens could have actual power through citizens unions, but the truth is we aren’t wealthy enough where the average person can focus on ideals and cultural progress over their own jobs. The sliver of free time left is spent on family and leisure (as it should). Until we revolutionize work, there will always be technologies that steer in directions that the population never asked for.

November 8th, 2023

10:05 pm — I still think it would be neat to release a cryptic Super Mario game that has billions of dollars of Bitcoin hiding inside of it. Hit me up if you have too much money.

8:05 pm — Passive income, passive income, passive income.

6:19 pm — Tempted to write a piece that is an “ode to a boring life.” There’s a quote about this, but it could be neat to expand it into something personal. Basically, paint a portrait about myself that underemphasizes the importance of travel, social circles, and adventure. It then glorifies that profound things you can do from a place of stability (ie: family and creative boldness).

12:18 pm — Update: at least 7 spiders live inside my fig tree.

10:20 am — You “become the ooze” when you yourself miniaturize into this goopy force that can slosh in and out of the pores, navigating the crevices that clunkier institutions could never fit through.

November 7th, 2023

6:01 pm — An essay about the types of pseudonyms.

Full pseudonym
Half pseudonym
Stage name
Religious name
Ethnic name

2:12 pm — The object hyper! Scud fiddle bedrock beneath crum cricket is the rubric to save all rubrics to save all the glee wee conquistadors of glyph tukery to render the fu fu fu (or, will you let Dingus orient YOU to the hyper object?). Dare not tread at the gates of brains in vats where cats scratch glass and meooooooow for crystal intelligence, meeoeoooow for the clarity of the raving poet bard who weaves spells too dank for the governors to even recognize as English.

1:54 pm — Fung mango woo? Ze voxalizifantergore. I don’t want to sing! Let me out here! The tranglalafomo of the daego gookabox. The metrics are unreal, Phillip.

November 6th, 2023

5:31 pm — I've started journaling for the 1st time in a long time. It’s less vulnerable than it is unstructured mind dumping. The tool is Mindsera. It uses AI to structure your thought and make recommendations. TBD if this sticks.

10:52 am — In prepping for the tag sale, I learned about “the diggers.” These are the Storage-War-heads; they don’t want old antiques laid out on tables… they prefer to burrow through shit. The maze of the basement is a feature. I’m selling my drum set down there, and I just imagined myself playing a 3-hour Whiplash solo as the diggers fought over china, vacuum cleaners, and broken computer monitors.

I also learned there will be a cop with a gun, perhaps a Rottweiler, and hoards of fanatic buyers who will either shoplift or make offers 100x below market price.

9:49 am — Ethel was selling her home and had to purge her 276 pairs of shoes, mostly unworn, mostly still wrapped in boxes. I laid them all out in her back office. They took up the whole floor. “Pretend this is a shoe store; pick the ones you love.” I tried to Marie Kondo her, but she was in a frozen panic. That day I learned she makes decisions in a less rational way: the classic invite-your-friends-over-to-insult-you-as-you-try-on-each-pair method. “I wouldn’t be caught DEAD in that.” “Reminds me of death.” “Nice! What color is that? Vomit?” It was a chorus of ugly ugly ugly. In the end, we really narrowed it down to 74 pairs.

8:13 am — Super Mario Guide to Editing; the problem is ego, a fixed and stable vantage point.

7:34 am — Notes for the “super mario guide to editing” essay:

The power of editing is perspective shifting; imaginal perspective (vs. imagination); time; from diverge to converge (delete); consider a fresh reader’s stream of consciousness isn't interrupted. Friends (literally another), out loud (a medium shift), reading on a phone with small text (access shift) ... bad writing comes from a fixed vantage point; have to guess about a readers counter-intuitiveness; if a reader will care about your prose flourishes.
Edit / Magpie / Rewrite / Shift
A gradient from clear to experimental
Edamame for editing
Step outside yourself and understand the reader’s arc
The topics you write about, your personality, your goals -- idiosyncrasies with language -- all non-measurable, specific to you -- yet, essay rubric are real. What are the shared givens beneath what everyone's trying to do? Can we say what an objectively good essay is? Could it be useful to know how to write one?

7:15 am — Feels kind of odd that you can’t become a paid Substack subscriber through mobile. (Note: I can just search SUBSTACK on my logs to find anything related to the platform. It’s my bug log.)

6:48 am — Core metrics: was it fun? Would you do that again? Did it make your wife laugh?

November 5th, 2023

7:11 pm — Neil Postman quote

Almost all of the characteristics we associate with mature discourse were amplified by typography, which has the strongest possible bias toward exposition: a sophisticated ability to think conceptually, deductively and sequentially; a high valuation of reason and order; an abhorrence of contradiction; a large capacity for detachment and objectivity; and a tolerance for delayed response.

6:15 pm — When the last sentence of an essay calls back to the intro.

5:55 pm — As I was taking out the trash, out of the corner of my eye, I saw an impossible event. A black salamander scurried onto the street only to get crushed by an orange leaf falling on it. The black salamander was actually just the shadow of the leaf.

Feels like that’s an effect, when two seemingly independent things are actually a single event.

3:34 pm — Philosophy often gets tangled in the conceptual, in definitions, in the nuances, in the context, in the self-referential. We should approach the complex and the abstract, but we shouldn’t stay there. There’s an obligation to bring it down to the Earth and make it clear, beautiful, and relatable.

Otherwise it’s a club that’s loves a language of confusion.

It risks making the most important ideas in the world cryptic and irrelevant.

Philosophers should strive to be educators, not lawyers.

10:46 am — Civilization is a teenager speeding 120 mph in a Lexus. An accelerationist will use the marvel of driving as a reason to go 240.

9:01 am — Using AI to find glitches inside of video games…

7:17 am — I am 6 years late to this, but Super Mario Odyssey is great. It surprisingly lives up to the word “odyssey,” in that it’s hypnagogic and kind of psychedelic adventure. Of course, it’s a kids cartoon. But it’s often switching perspectives (back and forth from 2D to 3D), changing scales, and has a recurring theme of embodiment (where you have to possess your enemies to move forward). It bends a lot of the constants that have existed in video games for decades.

November 4th, 2023

4:56 pm — A writer can write in public under cover. A voice noter can’t.

4:45 pm — Found myself humming the AI version of blackbird as I was moving boxes at my mother-in-law’s house. After that, found myself singing 10+ different variations from my own imagination. The lyrical ideas can take on infinite variations, and each one had a spirit of silliness, mockery, and absurdity to it. Reminds me of the spirit of the Beatles in the Get Back documentary. Clowning around is a permutation engine: you might fine something actually worth taking seriously.

3:41 pm — The car-heads are outside the pizzeria, loitering, probably high, definitely unaware of us trying to park (… a sale is going down…) ; inside is a large group with a briefly screaming baby, and also a gun with a cop in an embellished uniform.

2:26 pm — DALL-E 3 (embedded inside of ChatPGT) seems to have a more natural prompting language. It’s a bridge between my visual imagination written out in plain English, and the syntax of what DALL-E wants. With Lexica and Midjourney, it felt like I had to write in a highly fractured list form, where order mattered and not everything was digested. Feels like a big deal for writers who just want to turn a visual idea into prose. I’ll probably be cancelling Midjourney.

9:01 am — Substack is not Smash Bros.

November 3rd, 2023

10:52 pm — My grandfather is a realist about death. Of the ~5 people I see regularly over 75, no one mentions it. But every time I see my grandfather, he’s speculating how many months he has left, always with a smile.

9:00 am — Architecture critiques; a throwback to an older time; nostalgic. Inspired to write some “memoir” style recounting of it. It was intense, odd, and likely unlike a traditional college experience. I think it’s an important experience, one that more people should have. There’s an observational angle to it too (the decay of the profession, paired with the intensity and visionary nature of schooling).

6:10 am — Wondering if I crossed a line by mentioning “the bukkake Beatles” in a delirious list of the variants of Beatles sub-culture that might spawn from the age of AI. Would it piss someone off and get them to subscribe? Would they think something of me? Would someone who likes it feel dissuades from sharing it? Or is it just a funny and appropriate point?

November 2nd, 2023

8:07 pm — After I published, I ran out buy some birthday gifts for my wife at a nearby shopping center. I was cranking the White Album (appropriate after posting my Beatles essay). They are always better than I remember. There’s a strange quality where their music doesn’t get stale over time. There are enough layers that your memory forgets some details and always hears something fresh.

Was tempted to write a whole essay on Dear Prudence or Helter Skelter.

2:26 pm — Note to a friend on Kerouac’s On the Road:

He basically turned 4 years of cross-country hitchhiking into a memoir. The writing style might be experimental, so I wonder if that interests/annoys you. It's famous for being confessional/vulgar/raw — speaks about homosexuality, drugs, sex, Catholicism, all in the 1950s — he got tortured by the public for it and basically killed himself, and then he became the hero of the hippy movement (he hated hippies).

12:30 pm — When a paragraph isn’t working, distill it down to a one-line phrase. The reason it sucks is because you failed at unpacking it. Through compressing it back down, you remember the essence, and perhaps you will correctly unpack it on a 2nd, 3rd, or 8th take.

An idea is a batch of 100 kernels of popcorn. On the first take, only 25 of the unpack correctly. Reduce it down to kernels and pop again.

In this constant melting and reforming of paragraphs, you lose voice and phrasings, the linguistic accidents that emerge from writing. Save them. Clip them. Put them somewhere and later see if you can lace them back in.

November 1st, 2023

6:26 pm — Declaring that all we need is more technology is like declaring all we needed was more Romeness at the peak of Rome.

Dean's List

Logs | 2023-11-November

November 30th, 2023

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