Logs | November 2022

Dec 18, 2022

November 30, 2022

10:08 pm – Good writing is rarely summoned at will. It can’t be turned on cold. The engine has to be on. It’s an emergent outcome, the fusion of embodied craft and real-time obsession.

The scientist writer vs. the chaotic writer – 9:55 pm

A new question has slanted my lens on writing. I’m becoming a judge. An arbiter… Can quality be measured? Is there an objective framework that can score an essay across 10 dimensions? Of course, there are intangible sides of the craft, and two pieces that get a 92/100 can be alien, sharing nothing in common. Still, the magic of writing CAN be reduced. And even that reduction of art into a measurable science can reap massive rewards. These diagnostics, paired with the right, repeated, visual exercises, can accelerate craft at extraordinary rates (at least, that’s my secret hope).

All that said, there’s a risk when curiosity slices through words. Too much time vacationing inside the mind of a scientist builds the unconscious predisposition towards order, logic, and method. You slip into patterns of thinking, and lose touch with the mystical and violent impulse to blot out unpredictable Rorshacs of thought.

Being split-brained helps here. I want to black-out and erupt verses onto a page like a blind howling half-conscious typist, and then, in about five seconds, boot into Euclid mode for analysis and editing.

Sillyness into the void
9:10 pm – At first quietly, and then louder and louder until it turned into a repeated chant, I yelled, “I have no allegiance to the Stinkleberries!” in different accents. Over and over, in my car, to myself. It’s not a performance, and I didn’t even realize I was doing it. It’s kind of like this childish outlet of explosive silly energy that emerges when I’m alone.

No hands
9:09 am – Found myself in a weird daydream, imagining what life might be like with 0 of 2 hands. In this vignette, there was an intentional and profound reason for why I intentionally removed my hands. Then I felt the stupidity of this decision, and the tragedy of no longer being able to make art, eat, or interact with 3D space. It sounds pointless and negative, but this strange emotional reality (if you can hypnotize yourself into actually feeling it), can usher a surreal gratitude.

Marijuana and creativity – 7:54 am

Looking back and forth between the two drawings I made, my thesis professor was startled… “These two come from a completely different hand.”

What happened? Weed.

On the left was a floor plan that could’ve been conceived in the walls of a corporate office— clear lines, order, rationality. On the right was a Corbusier-Picasso fusion, curved walls, and weird symbolic shapes, that seemed both ancient and alien— it was singular and mysterious.

I had been working on the logical plans for days, and felt frustrated. Then, one night, after getting depressed at a Super Bowl party, I headed into the studio, got stoned, and knocked out the new plans from scratch in one take.

I can’t understate the role weed had in my early creative process, from ~19-24 years old (and five years after it too, but probably less often). It’s not something I do anymore, but those early marijuana experiences in design studio likely shaped the crevices in how I think.

It’s hard to isolate. That whole phase of life was a mixing pot of stimulation— intense focus, insane hours, passion, sacrifice, maturity, design experience, and weed. But marijuana was, in 90% of scenarios, strict, sparse, and ritually used, at moments of big creative decisions. Weed seemed to reliably melt the gestalt forms I had of my current design, and let new structure emerge, organically, from the subconscious. It had a way of melting away mental callus, letting me step into a problem with complete presence and a fresh eyes.

Time and time again, little by little, I internalized these lessons in process. I started to never get too comfortable with my own forms, to be willing to shed what I thought was “good enough,” and to approach design with a state of potential.

I don’t smoke anymore, at least not often. Maybe it’s my age, but the experience feels like a stressor on my body that takes away more than it adds. But I look back on those early experiences with nostalgia, and near religious importance. I’m thankful I got the message.

7:38 am – I feel another temptation towards Substack. It feels like commenting, liking, and discussion are exploding in the comments section. In newsletters, this is 1:1, and even though I enabled it on Ghost, I barely even notice it myself (it is even on?). But then, as I upload 100s of images to my Ghost site, I’m grateful I have this flexibility. It’s always a dilemma of trade-offs.

November 29, 2022

11:59 pm – Depending on who you ask, I’m either a chill, quiet, introverted, sweet person — or, I’m intense, intimidating, hardcore, and obsessive.

11:11 am – We think of the human at the frontier of evolution, but what if humans are just vehicles for language? We’re just a pass-through— a one-use vessel, a walking petri-dish, to incubate and evolve new language constellations. Through us, language shapes the surface of the earth, and slides into our pockets with sleek micro-electronics. To us, it’s magic and mystery, but it’s on an ascent we can’t grasp. Language will shed us like a winter coat in the spring. We’re unleashing, higher forms of autonomous order that can exist without us.

November 28th, 2022

Logging requires awareness shifting
8:23 pm – I'm realizing how hard it is to teach the ‘write from abundance’ concept. It’s not a theory to be learned, it’s a literal shift in awareness. It’s about noticing how the conversations you have, the things you read, and the little epiphanies you have are all fuel for short-form writing.

Haunted by past careers
8:01 pm – I feel pain and disappointment when I look at my old architecture models, but not regret. I found an old study model of mine from 2014 and marveled at it. I spent five hard years obsessed with 3D spatial design. The intricately crafted balsa wood all came together in overlapping patterns of harmony. I got it. That model was me at the peak of my ability. I feel pain for abandoning the craft, and disappointed that I never came close to even realizing the career I felt was possible within me. But I don’t regret leaving, because now I know the unfortunate role and reality of architects in the construction industry. They’re struggling with relevance, and talented young designers are grasping for limited oxygen. After some research yesterday, I learned that architecture has the highest suicide rate out of all white-collar professions. I'm glad I got out, and thrilled with my new direction. I feel limitless, passionate, and aligned. I found a new outlet, but I’m still haunted by that past-life.

Logs as a secret/public universe
2:21 pm - My logs feel like a secret universe, but not too secret. Technically it’s transparent and anyone can peer into my thoughts. But since it’s not blasted, and it’s straight into the Notes app, I feel open to say what’s really on my mind. That would totally get lost if they went straight into Twitter (at least, that’s my assumption, as someone who doesn’t like to draw attention to themselves).

2:17 pm – What’s changes do you make when you admit you’re playing a 10 year game?

Memory reels
2:08 pm – Considering getting Rayban glasses with cameras in them. I feel like it would be neat to record days of my life, and then create 60 second montages that include 100 clips. You’d get these split second impressions of my life. In just a flash, you get a compressed version of my visual existence. It’s not ideal that Facebook owns that data, but it’s not a dealbreaker for me.

Entering the imagination – 9:12 am

AI prompting taps into my obsessions and addiction. It feels simple, almost like the task of a mercenary to extract cheap art from machine slaves. But I find myself intensely focused, almost unable to process anything else in my environment. Dozens of images are being generated. They’re close to what I want, but not quite it. I’m locked in because I feel like I’m at the cusp of unlocking a masterpiece.

The prompt-salad is like a puzzle, and I’m tweaking single words to notice how the visual field changes. AI-generated art minimizes the gap between your imagination & the canvas in front of you. Previously, you needed to master techniques, whether it was a paint brush, or an arsenal of Photoshop tools. Now, if you can learn the syntax and semantic of prompting, you can get close at rendering the visions in your head.

The technique here isn’t visual, but in mapping words to visual traits. It’s never a one-and-done prompt and run. You’re in dialogue with a machine. As preliminary renders come in, it refines and clarifies the destination you want to arrive at.

I’m not saying that this process is parallel to fine arts. I love drawing, and I draw for different reasons— it’s a pleasant fusion of relaxation, creation, and problem solving. But I see AI-art as a frontier to generate imagery for my writing. It’s not the main event, it’s supplementary.

AI is going to excel at filling in secondary gaps that improve your primary, analog craft.

Coaxing the machine
8:46 am – I want to get to a point where I really understand how words are interpreted by an AI. Prompting is the ability to develop a line of communication with a machine. Sure, you can sling any combination of words and get something decent back. But the ability to be precise is where you can enter the realm of magic, and bridge the gap between art and your imagination.

What I’m doing now is running the same sentence over and over through Lexcia.art, but modifying the adjective each time.

’A cat with a [ ] forrest in the background’

mysterious = fog, shadows
trippy = warped shapes
psychedelic = bright colors, and contrast
geometric = reduced to lines & triangles
maximalist, intricate, ornate = expressed through tiny parts (can’t tell the difference)

7:40 am – The funniest lapse of dream logic last night— ‘this sandwich doesn’t have a back button.’

November 27th, 2022

The importance of tchotchkes
11:20 pm – "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful" is the famous quote of William Morris that epitomized his own way of living of Gesamtkunstwerk.

Permanent adolescence
11:18 pm – Sometimes I feel like an infant in a simulation. Within the games I’ve inherited, I thrive. But I’m out of touch with my own biology. Like a helpless infant, I wouldn’t be able to hunt, farm, or fend for myself. Within the game, my mind attains what it needs — income, curiosity, knowledge, purpose, relationships. It’s fully satisfied in its false Eden. There’s little reason to return to fundamentals, and it’s hard to half-ass survivalism as a hobby. I feel compelled to dive deeper and deeper into the ventures of mind. I know it’s time to start a family soon too, and I will. But I also feel this strange discomfort of being a permanent, helpless, adolescent, unadapted to the grounds from which I sprang.

The architect as the master generalist – 10:49 pm

Architecture studio is disconnected from professional practice. The pragmatists have a clear answer. Downplay the importance of ‘fantasy design world,’ and reduce the degree to 4-year technical spring on industry preparation. Basically, a trade school. I think this would be a terrible loss. Architecture studio, though it’s preoccupied with buildings, is actually the training grounds for master generalists.

In many ways, architecture is the ultimate liberal arts degree. It fuses history, with applied composition at multiple scales, with dialogue and critique, and it’s only feasible for those with grit, focus, and passion. Students take the program so seriously because they have autonomy to shape their own projects, within constraints, over months, in competition with their peers. The whole model is incredible. And yet, the graduates pour into a crumbling industry with scant opportunity.

The role of architect has been forked into dozens of specialized trades, from interiors, to engineering branches, to contractors, subcontractors, program specialists and owners reps. The architecture owns & reviews the design, but it’s really the GC that owns the process now. Some might say that architecture needs to reclaim its scope in construction. But what if we moved in the opposite direction instead?

What if ‘architecture’ retreated from the building industry. We already use the term when referring to ‘software architecture.’ The term, in its most general sense, can mean the resolution of a macro design scheme, in alignment with the smaller details, all to the tune of a specific draft. Architecture can be studied, learn, practiced, applied, and mastered across many fields — from architecture, to writing, music, software, company building, marketplaces, server networks, urban planning, landscapes, products, marketing, operations. By learning the basics of multiple crafts, and understanding the universal “architectural principles,” you inherit theme and can apply them anywhere.

One of my advantages in architecture school is that I was simultaneously composing songs and writing essays. By pursuing three crafts at once, I internalized the patterns between them. It shaped the lens that I now bring to anything. This is the essence of the Liberal Arts, and the “Renaissance man,” or, the polymath. If you look back, the architect and the polymath were interchangeable figure.

It’s perhaps the most polymathic of industries, and yet, architects these days are often pigeon holed into detailing window sills for 1-2 decades.

Psychedelic ornament vs. architecture
9:46 pm – When people think of “psychedelic architecture,” they probably first think of a building with spectacular melting facades. Trippy! There’s a spectacle around psychedelics. An aesthetic. But this doesn’t equate to how buildings should be designed for psychedelic experiences. Alex Grey’s temple in upstate New York for example, has Greek psychedelic ornament on the exterior, and the interior is filled with visionary trip-inspired paintings. And yet, spatially, the building is just a rectangle. Psychedelic architecture is really about the fusion of ritual, the chemical timeline of a substance, and specific articulations of space that etch light, symbols, and wonder into the psyche of the ‘initiate.’

Co-writing process
5:35 pm – Seems like my wife and I are going to co-write a long form essay about design studio and the perils of the industry. How do you co-write? We have an idea. The essay has first drafts. In draft one, she writes and I edit. In draft two, I write and she edits.

Self-driving cars and city design
4:08 pm – What effect will self-driving cars on cities of the future? I’m wondering what new cities in 2100 will look like. Aside from the farfetched renderings in sci-fi movies, where self-driving cars are blitzing through intersections and up the facades of buildings, I wonder what’s practical. There’s a real chance that road design will change, parking is radically reduced, and cities are more pedestrian friendly.

Analog mental lists
4:06 pm – One muscle to practice is keeping a list of insights during the course of conversation. As the conversation flows, how many breadcrumbs can you keep in your memory while still engaging?

AI-art prompt example
3:16 pm – An hyperrealistic intricate mysterious envelope with a stamp that features a turkey monster in the style of dan mumford and sachin teng, ornate background with intricate birds hearts and rectangular mail, cnn on acid, blue and purple highlights, 8k upscale, shadows and high contrast, muted colors, clear gestalts and distinct forms

November 26th, 2022

8:13 pm – It’s weirdly addicting to generate AI art. Not sure if everyone experiences, or if it’s me, but it’s happened all 3-4 times I’ve dove into it. It feels like I’m at the edge of generating a masterpiece for my essay, and I just need to crack this puzzle by stringing together the right sequence of words. It’s challenging and puts me in a flow state. It’s more in the realm of language & problem-solving than art.

5:28 pm – Bitcoin is a tradeoff between transparency & sound monetary policy. Its title as "crypto" is ironic because it's on a public ledger and is extremely trackable. Even if your wallet is pseudonymous, it can be linked with your IP. That said, it does print money according to an equation, and is outside the realm of human intervention.

9:55 am – Tall, Venti, and Grande is a terrible sizing classification. I get why they’re not straightforward with Small, Medium, and Large, because that’s super Dunkin. But at least lick words that make sense. Tall=Small is so counter-intuitive.

9:10 am – Anyone reading this log owes me 10 dabloons.

Defining 'artist'
8:40 am – Oscar Wilde's quote defines the artist in a pretty extreme way. It's phrased as an unhealthy absolute. There definitely is an 'artist <> marketer' spectrum, but you don't want to sit blindly at either end. A good artist is open to feedback and reactions. External resonance is actually helpful, but ultimately, it's internal resonance that guides. Wilde makes it seem like if you even glimpse into the reactions to your work, you're tainted.

The moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman. He has no further claim to be considered as an artist. — Oscar Wilde

Stranger proof essays – 8:32 am

The most time consuming part is that last 10-15% where i’m connecting all the dots for the reader that are already connected in my head. basically: the process of making the context explicit. – Isabel

S, M, L is my new publishing philosophy – 8:24 am

There are three 'scales' to publishing. Over the last two years, I've been able to focus on 1 of the 3 and get it right, but then I'd lose focus on the other 2. By defining this as S, M, L, I'm hoping to build a system where I can sustain all 3.

Small covers daily repeat actions. I focus on a high quantity of small ideas that are only 50-100 words each. I generally take 3-10 notes in iOS Notes each day. So every morning (7am), I go in, read them, edit them, and then re-route them, either to my website (here), or to a newsletter / Twitter staging area. I also try to use this time to open Readwise and read 'the daily review.' It's like spaced repetition from ideas I've highlighted, and I try to respond . By having this constant stream of small ideas, I have an abundance of material for my other channels & mediums. This daily practice helps keep the system going. Ideas flow out of my head without friction, and end up where they need to be. Plus, I get the benefit of practicing writing – I put int he reps without having to structure full essays.

Medium covers single-session events. At the end of 1-2 hours, there is a definable goal that involves me putting something out to the world. These can be setup as recurring calendar events. I have 2 Medium sessions setup, “Send Dean’s List,” and “Publish posts in Hypefury.” Thanks to notes I gather in the daily Small session, these are doable in one sitting.

Large is about essay writing. These ideas take me longer than one session. They’re also unpredictable and hard to keep on a schedule. They require research, rounds of feedback, and re-writes. These can be 1,500 - 3,000 words. I finish them when I finish them. I try to leave 2 big blocks in my week for this kind of writing. At the end of each session, I leave instructions for what I’ll do on the next session.

This system lets me focus on both rapid quantity and slow-burn quality.

The paradoxical goals of clarity and tension
8:18 am – Writing follows a yin-yang function. There are two opposing forces that want to be satisfied at the same time. One is clarity, the other is tension. For example, an introduction has two paradoxical goals. It wants to introduce the main idea, while also leaving some gaping hole and teasing the reader. Either one alone is a problem, leaving you either resolved or confused. You can bring rules to a liberal art, but they’re nuanced and tricky.

Writing teachers with a doctrinaire belief in brevity urge students to focus. They encourage selection and elimination in the service of explicit intentions. The result is highly legible writing. Every word serves a singular function. Every paragraph contains one idea. Every piece of prose follows one sequence of thoughts. There is a beginning, a middle and an end. Like a city laid out by a High-Modernist architect, the result is anemic. The text takes a single prototypical reader to a predictable conclusion. In theory. More often, it loses the reader immediately, since no real reader is anything like the prototypical one assumed by (say) the writer of a press release. An insistence on focus turns writing into a vocational trade rather than a liberal art.

Open algorithms
8:11 am – Why are algorithms secret and creepy? There’s a hidden robot watching my every action, guessing my taste, and controlling my reality. I’d pay money to be able to design my robot. Readwise is a model citizen here. Every input of your algorithm has a slider, and you can tweak the frequency that a source protrudes into your feed. Imagine being able to customize your Twitter feed like this? You could control the frequency of people, surface older posts, hide viral threads — you could create a custom feed that’s actually valuable to you.

November 25th, 2022

3:01 pm – Tap into the core emotion of a piece. Find a theme that relates to where you actually are, so you can actually tap into something real instead of abstract.

The threshold of starting
2:42 pm – Get started on the hard, but important things. There’s that invisible resistant that keeps you forever looping and justifying. It’s always amazing how you can find flow just 60 seconds into starting. But all these barriers create psychic friction from even putting your fingers on the typewriter.

2100: The effect of VR/AR on city planning

1:24 pm – Has there ever been a technology that influenced the shape of human settlements more than cars? Will there ever be an equally transformative force? Could VR/AR change the nature of human settlement by the end of the next century?

The implication here is that you can tap into the high-speed current of work, culture, and entertainment without physically commuting to places. Zoom obviously sucks, but we might get to a point where remote work is indistinguishable from in-person work.

If so, I wonder If megapolis’s will dissolve (in general, mega shanty towns are on the rise globally). The momentum in urbanism is towards urbanism, but I wonder if a new technology can reverse course. Imagine a constellation of scattered towns, where everything within them is walking distance, and cars are only, 1) on the outskirts of the town, and 2) used to move from town to town.

Flow vs. capture
12:55 pm – It’s kind of crazy how high-novelty experiences (ie: vacations or anniversaries), are the most special, but sometimes the hardest to capture in writing. Photographs are a fine substitute, but writing captures an emotional resolution that pictures can’t compete with. In these ebbs of life, I’m so in the flow of experience, that there’s friction to stop and capture. Maybe it’s okay to let these important moments fizzle into the black hole of memory, or maybe, it’s our obligation to document our life. By archiving and reviewing the moments that matter, maybe it infuses us with meaning and perspective, and can even play a role in altering our trajectory. In either case, it’s funny how now I’m here in a Starbucks, on a random forgettable afternoon, so bored, with such bandwidth, that I’m pointlessly writing about the strangers in line.

Interstitial journaling
12:53 pm – I set a 15-minute recurring timer on my watch. It reminds me to stop what I’m doing, pause, tune into something on my mind, and write about it. It helps me take breaks, log my experience, and re-enter work with a fresh mind. It’s a tunnel vision preventer.

Novelty vs. Family Rituals
12:51 pm – When it comes to creative or professional pursuits, I feel like I have the space to experiment, be myself, and establish rituals that can guide others. When it comes to family, I feel like I default to what exists: social norms, communication cadences, gift giving, etc. When you have kids, it almost feels like a new slate, where everything is rediscovered. But when it comes to immediate and extended family, is there a way to bring novelty into it? Are some families open to new ideas, while others are bound to tradition? Ie: what could Christmas rituals & gift-giving look like this upcoming month? How could December be like no other December in family history?

Beyond journaling
12:17 pm – It’s important for these logs to be juicy, confessional, and revealing of the details in my everyday life. It’s the Personal pillar of POP, but at the micro scale. If I only log about ideas, I’m losing the texture, resolution, and granularity of my day to day life. At the moment of taking this note, I’m at a Starbucks after dropping Danielle off at the train station. I’m here logging until the line shortens so I can order a sandwich. There is definitely a risk of ‘journaling’ where this kind of transparency has no value for a stranger (or even my future self). It helps to always see through the POP lens, where even mundane experience has some ‘so what?’ takeaway, and it’s crafted in a way so that it’s elegant/enjoyable.

Stats I’d like to know after one year of logging – 8:55 am

Total words
Total logs
Total words/characters per log (vs Tweet)
Average logs per day (variance)
Average interval (assuming X hours sleep)(variance)
Word cloud
Days logging vs. not logging

8:05 am – I’m guilty of confusing what I can do through a Herculean lift and what I can do sustainably. After an inspirational workshop, I did an 8-hour lift where I wrote out around 60 tweets and 5 threads over the next week. This was the new bar. Yikes. I’ll do this every week, forever! I never did it since. Meta-principle: have the lowest possible bar for recurring events, and feel free to flex up when the bandwidth is there. It’s foolish and false to assume you’ll always be able to carve out bandwidth.

7:39 am – A ratio between time spent and depth of connection.

November 24th, 2022

1:51 am – A species that only speaks in acronyms.

Slang Glossary
10:43 am – Slang stands for "street language." I must've known that, but I forgot it. I found myself on Urban Dictionary today. My memories of this site go back to high school, and I used to only think of it as a source of raunchy, absurd sex positions with ridiculous names. That still exists, but now I see it as a social network that captures the explosion of language. Terms are interlinked, and it almost feels like a Wikipedia, but horny, on acid, with dubious quality. Still, there are some gems in here. Internet slang & slang networks are really just the modern incarnation of a long history of language mutation. Worth unpacking this, back through ancient history, and in our modern history. I'm most interested in understanding slang between 1920-1960, how it evolved from the Harlem jazz scene, to the beats, and then to the hippies, when electronic culture exploded. I also wonder how as a writer, I can intentionally build and refernce a personal slang library. Slang is often seen as a bad thing, since it creates in-crowds and out-crowds. But writers have the tools to build in context clues, and expand the vocabulary of anyone who reads it.

[ ] AF — denotes something as maximum quality.
Appalachian meth heads - bums in nature.
Armpit fuckers – when you follow a rule but basically break it.
Astroturfing — paying figures to support
Autosexual – someone only attracted to cars.
Awooga — to visibly show attraction.
Ball bag — a Scottish insult used as a friendly greeting.
Bermuda triangle of accountability – lack of 'buck stops' person.
BHS - butt hurt syndrome, overly sensitivite.
Big boy voice — a taunt towards a shy person.
Big dick energy – confidence.
Brown handle - to flood with shit and discourage entry.
Bucks – derogatory slang for Starbucks.
Charmander — a milennial arsonist.
Cling man — one who lingers in a social setting beyond what's appropriate.
Cockwomble — a bullshitter.
Culture vulture – one who monetizes on cultura trends.
[ ] Curious – to express openness to something.
Deja-poo — an uncanny string of repeated bad situations.
Elf-esteem – when you feel under-appreciated.
Florida Man — to describe bizarre news events.
Functioning [ ] – to denote you can put up with a condition.
Goblin Mode — freakish, supernatural, beast energy.
Google Maps Syndrome — obsessed with orientation.
Graduation goggles — nostalgic for finishing something you hate.
Green Flag - good signs, safe to enter.
Greenwash - fake environmentalism.
[ ] head – to denote your a hardcore fan (ie: deadhead)
Hot potato – a task nobody wants.
iPad kids — kids raised on swiping screens with low motor skills.
J-line — direct line to Jesus.
Kayfabe — always in character.
Kodak courage — confidence gained upon being filmed.
Lavender haze — love.
Lightbulb tans — when the only light you get is blue light.
Lolinator – someone who overuses lol.
Meatspace — non digital world.
Moral supremacy – to rank others on their ethics.
Mumble and shake – to avoid asking questions.
Night water - 2am replenish.
Okie Dokie'd – when someone gets deceived.
Pajama rich — when wealth transcends fashion.
Permabear – always optimistic.
Permabull – always pessimistic.
Poison Pill — to intentionally sabotage yourself.
Protip — to give advice in a descending way.
Quackgrass — a fictional drug.
Rainbow capitalism – when companies pretend to support gay rights.
Ringwall— a false tough guy.
Rug Pull – to get scammed.
Schlep — an annoying effort.
Sexth sense — when you can predict someone's presence in bed.
Sillybilly - someone who can’t turn off their playfulness.
Sodium chloride meals – unappealing phrase for salty fast food.
Sweet nothing — compliments without substance.
Texas [ ] – to explain something oversized. (Texas pileup = 20 person orgy)
Tikbait — clickbait on reels.
Third wheel of [ ] - Something extraneous to an obvious pair.
Toilet Read - signals a 4 minute attention span.
Womb sniffer — a pro-abortion male.
Yacht talk — crazy big ideas
Zomcom — romcom with zombies.
Zugzwang — a decision where both options are bad.

Ear-worm laws
10:37 am – I’m not saying there should federal laws around pop music, but something seems unethical about embedding sexual messages in ear-worms that get lip synced at Thanksgiving parades filled with families and children. I don’t want to throttle expression in any form. But it’s worth understanding the scale, reach, and context of expression.

Paragraph as the fundamental building blocks
10:08 am – Paragraphs as Euclidean objects. There’s a science to them that leads to gnosis, weeping, and addiction. Paragraphs are the ‘fundamental block’ of writing. In architecture, it’s rooms/spaces. Buildings are composed of rooms, and rooms are composed of walls, floors, and columns. In writing, essays are composed of paragraphs, and paragraphs are composed of words and sentences. The problem is we don’t have great models to think about paragraphs. Either we don’t think about it and go into jazz mode, or, we’re caught in academic rules live 5-sentences paragraphs ONLY. A few rules contrary to English class. 1) There are different paragraph types— some can be 1-2 sentences, other 10. 2) Paragraphs start with tension (hook) and end in resolution (links to shiny dime). 3) There’s a science to link paragraphs together.

Mastering the rubric
9:52 am – I wonder if building this framework is a cheat code. Meaning, if I actually develop this framework, and it’s right, could all my essays be 100/100? (Curious to go back and grade my old & recent essays, I’d guess I’ve probably grown from the 60s to the 80s.)

Custom curriculum
9:13 am – Even if 2 people score 70/100 on an essay, the diagnosis can be completely different. One writer can be 3.5 out of 5 across all 10 parameters, signaling balance. Another writer can be 5/5 in Personal/Playful pillars, but then a 1.8 out of 5 in Observational pillars. So even though they share a similar macro-score, their recommended areas of study/improvement look completely different. The macro score is actually pointless for the student. Where traditional school is all about macro scores, the macro scores here can be invisible. It’s more about using this scoring rubric to help deliver curriculum.

Scoring methods that enable variety
8:37 am – I’ve read 10-20 essays now while scoring them using a 9 square. I’m pretty obsessed with defining a framework for essay craft. The beauty is that a quantitative score isn’t a limiter on personality. Two essays with an 85/100 can have radically different vibes, but still share a quality standard. The mission here is reliable diagnostics and customized curriculum delivery. The ultimate sin of the education system is assembly line curriculum delivery.

The Pack-n-Go Method
8:05 am – If I do move to Austin, I’d consider leaving mostly everything behind and only taking whatever fits in the car. I’d take one box of rare books and get the rest on Kindle. My Gibson comes (and only the amp if it fits). Leave the drums. Bring the Bose speaker and Aura picture frame. Leave the standing desk, monitor, and VR headsets. Bring the MacBook, typewriter, stack of paper, keyboard, camera and mic. Hopefully the piano comes. I still see New York as my long term home, but I could see myself in Austin for 1-3 years. Is it worth moving the furniture?

8:03 am – In the winter, water sloshes through the copper pipes like a white noise machine.

An objective take on astral projection
7:57 am – I’ve been getting a lot of sleep paralysis recently. This usually triggers a fight or flight reaction. The natural move is to run. It’s weird to realize your body is frozen, and I often catch myself trying to shake out of it. But the one time I was open to it (around a month ago), I basically exploded out of my body into a hallucinatory odyssey. I realized that this is what others call ‘astral projection.’ It’s a new age term that stems from the interpretation of a very real experience. After having this happen to you, it’s natural to assume that ‘remote viewing’ is possible, that ‘the soul’ exists, and that this is your ‘after-life’ vessel. The whole thing becomes spiritual. But I think it’s possible to explain this biologically. Basically, the mind has the capacity to make detailed simulations of all the spaces you’ve ever been in, and Astral Projection lets you experience them in a ‘VR experience’ (of course with people and characters from your subconscious). You might feel like you’re “in a spirit body walking around your house,” but it’s more like a highly stable dream state with near perfect reconstruction. The fact that I may have the capacity to tap into this is exciting, but scary. There is a reptilian fear in doing this again, but I need to start seeing it as a gift/opportunity. Similar to how lucid dreamers do “reality checks” during the day to train their lizard mind, I should develop a similar practice to prep my mind for liftoff.

Moldy books
7:53 am – When I was in Austin, I bought an old book on Texas folklore through song. ($40, kind of a ripoff, this would’ve costed $3 in outer Nashville). In any case, the inner cover has funky mold on it, and since I’m hypochondriac, I imagine that every time I read this book it’s slowly killing me. The idea of dangerous moldy books makes me laugh. It’s like if an idea is so poorly preserved, it’s a metric that the ideas are foul and rotting, and become detrimental to consume.

7:52 am – My laundry hamper is a barometer for my systems.

The 15-minute check-in
7:51 am – Apparently Buckminster Fuller kept an interstitial journal, and wrote what he did every 15 minutes. Funny how he was an early inspiration, but I only adopted this practice 10 years later.

7:50 am – Dean’s List could be as simple as a list of logs over a single day. It’s an exploration of the types of lists.

The collapse of best practices
7:47 am – For me, ‘burnout’ isn’t a result of overworking or feeling stressed and defeated. It’s when I’m so consumed with heavy lift projects that I abandon my best practices. When I skip morning meditation or catch myself binge checking email or slack or Twitter, it’s a sign that I don’t have enough bandwidth to ‘work clean.’

Logs as craft practice
7:45 am – A log can be anything, and I notice them shifting between intellectual ideas, personal anecdotes and experiments with language. The most valuable use here is prose construction. Make sentences. This practice builds muscle with the craft.

7:44 am – My density of logging is a metric of my mental bandwidth and self-awareness.

November 23rd, 2022

The POP Interrogation Triad
8:02 pm – I seek to become a friendly interrogator of ideas. Asking these three questions helps you get to the heart of any idea. Why should the reader care about this? What does it make me feel? What is attention grabbing about this? I hold the bold conviction that everyone harbors gold ideas inside them, and these razors are tools that help excavate.

Note Wielding
7:09 pm – Now that my wife is a hardcore writer, we can nerd out on the nerdiest of things together. We had a contest to see how quickly we could grab our iPhone and open a new note. It felt like a pistol duel where every half-second matters. I won (4 seconds vs. 18 seconds). After helping her put the iOS note creation widget in her command center, she’s down to 5 seconds. That extra 13 seconds is the friction that prevents you from live-logging your experience.

November 22nd, 2022

4:25 pm – Wife said, “I fucking DEANED you, bitch!” after helping me reach an epiphany.

November 21st, 2022

Idea Leeches
2:25 pm – We use language like, "I have an idea," but it's more accurate to say that "ideas have you." Language is an exotic life former. After a meme is crafted and shared, it's out of their control, and it spreads like a virus, moving from host to host. Like a leech, a "york bajur," it twists around your cranium and controls your nervous system. It shapes your philosophy, your vocabulary, and how aggressively you recommend books to your friends. A philosopher is one who has been struck by the "meta-meme." They know the deceptive and dangerous nature of ideas, and are very careful about what they let in. Ideas don't dominate the mind of philosopher. Ideas get wrangled and tortured. The thinker carries many spears, with rare ideas skewered atop each other, and through writing they joust it into one of the veins of the Internet.

November 19th, 2022

The Fan Fiction of Oz
~1:00pm – Have you ever heard of "The Gnome King of Oz"? Not only were there 14 books penned by the original author L. Frank Baum, but there were dozens of spinoffs conceived by other authors. There's the 'official Oz cannon,' launched by the historically-kept 'Wizard Oz,' and then there are alternate fractured histories of Oz. An interesting early example of "Fan Fiction," even when publishing physical books had friction. Worth looking into this more.

November 18th, 2022

LANGUAGE FOR THE WEIRD – 7:47 pm

Our brain has the capacity to bring us incredibly bizarre experiences, hypnogogic porridge, astral projections, lucid dreaming, possessions states, tulpas, sober hallucinations, grand delusions, vibrating empathy, and the belief that all things are connected to all things.

The problem? We suck at forming language to make sense of these things.

When we are careless with describing altered states, we not only deceive ourselves, but we craft simple heart-warming language that spreads like a virus. The language we default helps us make sense of the strange in the short-term, but it ultimately devolves to woo, religion, and narcissism.

Esoteric practitioners teach the techniques to access these states. They give you a glimpse of the source, and it works. But they don't help with reason, philosophical razors, or sense-making– and there's an obvious reason for that. The techniques are approachable, and they result in short-lasting feel-good experiences.

Rationalization, on the other hand is cold, objective, and hard. It requires the patience to dwell in the land of logos without any definitive answers. This is basically the opposite effect of the saccharine dream you expect from paid meditation retreats.

Woo often misconstrues the logical mind as a nuisance to tame, and eventually shed. Thinking is the source of pain. It's to be avoided, and we have the language to prove it. "Get out of your head." "You're overthinking." "That's a very left-brained way to approach this." It's an attack on reason.

I'm no champion of batshit reason. Either end of the spectrum is a bad time. Logic alone brings your monkey mind to wield stones, pistols, and nukes. The other kind of attitude, the so-open-minded-your-brain-spills-out-your-ears stance is so deconstructive that it becomes impossible to hold on to anything. The floor is always lava.

It's the fusion of the two spheres where the real magic happens. Paranormal psychology is at the frontier of language. We need to dive into states that are irrational, vulnerable, intuitive, and unexplainable, and then we need to bring our sharpened mind to build maps of what's going on.

McKenna was a staunch believer in razors, and he brought them with him as a ventured into experiences that are stranger than you can imagine (we're talking self-transforming machine elves in hyperspace who speak in three-dimensional hieroglyphics). Not only did he experience the mysterium tremendum, the holy weirdness, but he coined language to transmit the nature of this reality to society. And now, others experience these DMT entities as elves too! It shows that language not only describes reality, but it shapes reality.

I've had not shortage of mental odysseys (without the use of drugs). I've been both voluntary and involuntary catapulted into weird trance states where I've been face to face with ghosts, Jesus, Allen Ginsberg, extra-terrestrials, and my dead ancestors. Closed eyes, I've walked through forests in my mind to bright red sheds with surreal things in them.

How do I make sense of this? Someone with frivolous language and a desire to cling to explanations might describe this in one of the various New Agey flavors. A connection to Mother Earth? Cleansed chakras? Squeegied my third eye to channel the juju of some levitating cross-legged ether God? I'd rather accept these direct experiences as mysteries. I sit with them as absurd paradoxes. They're both figments of my imagination, while also being the most defining moments my soul has experienced.

There are no clean answers at the edge states of perception. An honest thinker can't converge on any definitive philosophy. This is a tricky point, especially for the philosophers. To use razors, while also accepting that you're wrestling with unsolvable mysteries. But unsolvability isn't an excuse to give up. It's the kind of tidal wave, that if surfed, builds psychological muscle as the soul ebbs and wanes through the heaven and hell states of your inner world.

7:13 pm – Getting rained on in a glass-roofed car feels like an intitiation into the 21st century.

Rapid Clarification Questions
~3:00pm? – By explicitly saying, "I have some rapid clarification questions," you signal that you're looking to shift the nature and pacing of the conversation. It means you're looking to get out of divergent exploratory mode, and instead dive into rapid-fire questions to add clarity and arrive at common ground.

Cognitive Agility
9:07 am – In early-stage growing companies, it helps to have the trait of cognitive agility. Even if there is an unwavering focus on the big picture, the details change in response to emerging situations. This is true for essays too. It’s easy to get comfortable with a detail, and face resistance when that detail changes. But an openness to reboot and realign with the big picture is almost always an unlock.

November 17th, 2022

Ideas for Twitter – 10:39 pm

I’d pay to be able to customize my feed algorithm like you can do in Readwise.
I’d love to have content segments that people can subscribe to. It would let me overshare, knowing that people are subscribed to the facets of me they want to hear from (like Converkit segments)
A better portfolio for my best tweets and threads (a single pinned Tweet is pretty lo-fi)
How can we used spaced repetition to surface old tweets? How can we get outside the last 24 hours?
Imagine if people paid taxes on their account based on their following size.
Imagine if you only get one free tweet per day, which means it has to be quality.
What if the author had a kill switch to stop posts from going viral (in case of cancellations/getting ratio'd)

November 15th, 2022

Embracing Discomfort
10:57 pm – The writer’s journey is a psychological one. In addition to the hard skills of craft, the soft skills are real. As you write in public, all sorts of demons rush in. You compare yourself to others. You wrestle with your own perfectionism. You doubt your own abilities. You feel guilty for not sticking to your cadences.

There are three ways to respond to these stressors.

You get consumed by them without realizing, and it prevents growth.
You adopt a radical acceptance of yourself, which also prevents growth.
You stay resilient among the stress, and build self-awareness around the situation.

There’s a growing trend to avoid psychological discomfort at all costs. I think it’s worth swimming in it and understanding. There’s a competitiveness that’s useful if it’s self-aware and moderated. Perfectionism is a gift if it’s not given ultimate control. Seeing your flaws in high-resolution shows you where to put in effort to practice and improve. Guilt can be transfigured into action and reliable systems.

Growth comes from persisting through discomfort instead of running from it.

November 14, 2022

Crypto Casino
4:18 pm – The majority of cryptocurrencies act as a casino. The longer you stay in, the higher your chances are of losing. On roulette tables, even if you play black or red, your odds are less than 50%, since 0 exists outside of black/red. If you play multiple-hands, the odds are stacked against you, and you’ll trend towards zero. But the HODL philosophy is a reverse casino— if you can stay at the table for hours and hours (years and years), you will hit the jackpot. The delusion is that all of crypto operates like this. Perhaps Bitcoin works like this, and maybe a handful of others, but the majority will trend to 0.

November 12th, 2022

Perception of the Interiors
1:45 pm – We exist at the edge of an informational super space. Behind the doors of matter is an infinite holographic universe of imagination. If you turn the monkey hardware into standby mode, eliminating the senses, but keeping the mind awake, you release into the perception of the interiors. (blah blah blah)

Working with fragments
1:29 pm – There’s a trend of dissolution we’ve seen in the last 100 years— from jazz, to Picasso, to Marxism, to sexual boundaries, to gender, to the psychedelic shock to the ego. These all celebrate deconstruction and the glory of the fragment. Think about the Arcades by Walter Benjamin, and The Book of Disquiet by Pessoa. But fragmentation is only half the process. The other half comes through the act of reconstruction, of recasting ideas into higher orders of language, achieving both novelty and density. Only when we have thought fragments on the cutting board are we ready to compose. There’s a reason symphonies are scored and stories are scribes. Through externalized clumps, we can rearrange and shape thought like clay. But reconstruction hits a limit, and there is a point where we have to cut the head off the snake to grow 3 more. How far do you take this process of re-association? If it doesn’t consume you, it turns ideas into marble.

The shaman as an archetype
1:23 pm – McKenna talks about the Shaman as a figure deputized to be weird. “You live at the outskirts, and we’ll call you when we need you.” They’re people of indeterminate depth, with strange and hard-to-integrate wisdom. Annoying to the everyday, but essential in a crisis. Through history, they’ve taken shape as orphics, mystics, alchemists, theosophists, bohemians, beats, hippies, and crystal heads.

De-conditioning vs. re-conditioning
1:18 pm – A healthy culture has range of “agents of doubt.” Language, drugs, travel, and people are reconditioning agents. They dissolve past architectures, and let new ones seep in. However, we may be at a point where “de-conditioning” is happening at peak scale and intensity, but “reconditioning” is actually way harder. The breakdown of ego can be chemically induced. It’s democratic. Anyone can shed a worldview. But the construction of values requires good critical thinking, which isn’t automatic, or consumable through a pill. It’s hard work.

Hallucinations and Plato
1:16 pm – According to McKenna, hallucinations represent “beauty” in the Platonic triad (the good, the true, and the beautiful). Beauty is not abstract, it’s beheld. A hallucination is materialized insight. It’s a breach in the valve of consciousness, a pouring of imagination and meaning into meatspace.

The twilight of imperial decline
1:11 pm – What’s it like to live in the twilight of an imperial decline? Rome and Crete have been through this— over scaled, a lack of oversight, and a twisted distribution of resources. This time it’s different though. We’re preparing for the stars, our oceans are boiling, and individuals wield the power of empires. Before was just the dress-rehearsal. Now it’s the real deal. It's a paradox, where empires collapse, but individuals might ascend. We’re living through the explosive takeoff of our irreversible past. The worst reaction here is to resist or fear the trajectory we’re on. It’s best to accept that the apocalypse has already happened. It diffuses anxiety when you accept our impossible-to-wrangle destiny. We’re going through a collective psychedelic meltdown, except there may be no light at the end of the tunnel. It’s just weirdness all the way forward. Anyone who has been through personal psychological apocalypses are best prepared to navigate the upcoming times. Paraphrased from a Terence McKenna lecture.

Epigenetic explosion
1:04 pm – The biggest misconception of 'The Stoned Ape Theory' is that psychedelics had any impact on brain evolution. What psychedelics might have done to early humans is increase the rate of gibberish production. The substance increased the rate of language mutations, and some of them stuck with the tribe. Prolonged exposure to psychedelics didn't effect brain chemistry long-term, but it did flood early tribes with new mouth utterances that becomes associated with meaning. Psilocybin may have been a lubricant to expand early human dictionaries. It is not psychedelics that stretched human consciousness, but language. Psychedelics were something like an epigenetic explosion.

Throwing & cognitive evolution
10:01 am – The Major League Baseball pitcher is the pinnacle of human evolution. Our ability to throw might have been a factor that aided the development of mind. Throwing is a primate thing. Monkeys throw shit (though, they're not very good at it). To see something in the distance, to aim, to release, and to hit it– is a skill that is unique to humans. It's very different from using a rock or a club to bash something to death. The act of aiming and releasing is an act of projecting into the future. It's something animals don't do, and humans uniquely do (enter: calendar mind). Paraphrased from a Terence McKenna lecture.

What makes a good async chat space?
9:11 am – I’m thinking Random x Mindful x Frequent (RMF… acronym needs work, help!). Random posts steer the direction & invite new people to jump in. Mindful is about knowing when to break into 1:1 or group DMs (so it’s not 2-3 people taking over the public space). Frequent is a reminder to self to jump in here whenever I open Circle.

November 11th, 2022

1:18 pm – If I'm really focusing on a big project, like the Write of Passage curriculum, essay scoring, or even a long-form essay, I have reduced bandwidth to conceive new ideas. I'm wired to solve a few big problems. I have less space to wonder and marvel and muse over mundane details. Still, there's no reason why fragmented thoughts around larger projects can't make their way into the logs.

November 9th, 2022

8:46 am – Waking up on the morning after a 35 day class finishes feels like a baptism. The senses are reset. It’s a shift from tactical focus to open awareness

8:13 am – Attempted a new meditation today. Instead of counting upwards on every inhale, I counted using A|B in between every inhale/exhale. I also progressed through phases. I did a few breathes with eyes closed, then eyes open (but head fixed), back to eyes closed, then eyes open (but moving head), back to eyes closed, then finally moving around (while still counting A|B). The thought is to blend awareness between meditation and waking states. I often feel that closed eye meditations can feel too isolated from waking mindfulness.

November 8th, 2022

Originality as analysis and mimicry
8:06pm – Originality is probably seen as a inherited trait. But what if it's the byproduct of a certain kind of analysis & mimicry? By studying your favorite artists, and looking not at what they make, but how they think, you refine your lens on how the process works. By learning how the Grateful Dead jams, or how Bob Dylan answers interview questions, or how Hunter S. Thompson re-writes old novels, you upgrade your lens on how to deal with new information. Through studying artists (and practicing how they study), your refine how your inputs get translated into outputs.

November 7th, 2022

Split-second order placement
9:58 am – The speed at which I can order food is shocking. Within 13 seconds, I can select items, leave a tip, place my order, and get back to work. It happens so fast that I can sometimes forget that I've ever ordered the food. It's too casual. It's also super expensive.

The incorrect use of hyphens
9:16 am – I'm generous with the use of hyphens. I use them to combine words, even in cases when those two words, officially, should stand on their own. I view them as context dependent. A hyphen fuses two objects into one. Sometimes, based on the structure of a sentence, I'll want a single object instead of two standalone words. For example, if I'm writing out a list of things, the hyphen takes two words and makes them a single object in a matrix of other things.

November 6th, 2022

Lex AI spews fake facts
A danger of AI apps is that it spews facts that are comically wrong yet sound very convincing.

Kerouac and the art of blind rewrites
9:34 am – Kerouac's writing is technically “one-take” in the sense that he writes the whole thing, start to end, without editing. That said, he does do re-writes. There were 8-9 versions of On the Road that were rejected. From version to version, I don't think he was editing, refining, or even referencing. It was basically a new attempt from scratch. The previous attempt engrained new ideas into his subconscious that would naturally come out in the next attempt. It involved a trust that the essence would get stronger and stronger each take, and that the details weren't important to retain.

The public speaking demon
6:25 am – Weird dream. I was in an exotic country on a retreat, and we were waiting for a boat to take us into town, which turned out to be a 20-25 minute experience. "I knew we shouldn’t gotten that car service.” Anyway, it arrived and we got on and it was shoulder to shoulder. Looking for open side, I see a whole in the floor and a ladder to climb down into it, and find myself in a circle of punk kids sitting. One-by-one, they go around and confess something to the group, while someone wearing a mask in the middle makes crazy expressions to distract and intimidate them. This is the 'public speaking demon' and the person is wearing headphones, so they can't even hear what the speaker is saying. Deaf to their words, but taunting, so you know the demon isn't criticizing you based on your ideas. When it came to me, I politefully declined, and explained how I'm just observing, on my way into town. The group leader objects furiously, and forces me to speak. I go on a rant about writing under a pseudonym, how I've written hundreds of thousands of words, and how I'm at the edge of something special. As I'm talking, my throat is so dry, so even though I'm projecting, it just sounds like I'm wheezing.

November 5th, 2022

A dating app where the feed disappears upon a match
11:00 am – Are there any dating apps that are built on scarcity? I've been in a relationship since these came out, so I only know about them from second-hand stories, but they all sound like infinite feeds. I've heard of guys just swiping right to everyone to see which girls are interested in them. What if there were implications to getting matched? Imagine if after getting matched, your feed disappears, and you're in a 1:1 conversation with that person. Commit! Converse! There is pressure to talk and to make a decision, instead of holding 50 parallel conversations and ghosting as the default.

Cosmic lint vs. a galaxy in jeans
8:47 am – Response to Taylor: Thanks for sending this over. Interesting to note the shift in science fiction from society-scale to psychic-scale. I also appreciate your ending-- how this feels like both a call-to-adventure and a burden. I read the book "Four Thousand Weeks" recently, and he introduced me to the term "cosmic insignificance therapy." Basically, if you ever get stressed, just remember your a piece of space lint. But if you only operate from that miniscule perspective, why do anything? So.. you boot up the opposite perspective (I am a galaxy in jeans). There's something to gain in resolving that paradox-- between extreme ownership and extreme laziness.

The chills of meditation
7:18 am – A new goal for meditations is to induce the chills. It's proof that the nervous system is being affected, that a vision was beheld, or that a perspective was gained. It signals that the right brain was activated, that the reptilian brain was touched. Are there tactics to induce this? Can you triangulate love, feeling, sight, people, life, and death? Can you tap into the felt memory of laughter and crying and facial muscles? Can you see nature, or entities burst from the ground of a forrest? Can you visualize your species as cells in an ocean colliding? All these radical perspective shifts are like the attempted ignitions of an engine.

(Temporary) Capitalism blues
7:13 am – Is mass-market advertising the great demon? The human thirst for money paired with mobile devices and data analytics has created a potentially irreversible accident. It's polluted everything, and our platforms for conversing are cess pools. The arts of writing, photography, and cinematography have become weapons to push products. Capitalism has slanted our moral compass, and the operating system is so engrained, it's invisible.

November 3rd, 2022

Customizable voice in AI Writing
10:09 am – Good AI for writing will fuse both ideas and writing craft. Right now, the obsessions is with using the right training data and language models so that it can convincingly vomit responses to prompts. These apps don't give you any control over voice. Assumptions are baked in and unchangeable. Imagine a panel where you can control things like sentence length, sentence length variable, average syllables per word, syllable variation, tone palettes, a 'probability of tangents' variable, etc.

Bagel Store Mysteries
8:22 am – The long wait at the bagel shop gives me time to comprehend the Bagel Store Mysteries. I marvel at the raw memory power of the under-leveraged cashiers, the logistics of bread and snack packaging, the history and unit economics of refrigerators, the monthly rent of this 15' x 90' shoebox along an American strip mall, the personal victories and tragedies of the employees, the daydreams and anxieties of everyone else waiting in line, the language used in the contract to commission the creepy bagel clip art that hangs on the walls, the return on investment for their laminated business cards, the origin of the flickering exit sign, and the installation date of the security cameras and the industrial jug of hand sanitizer. I'm an idiot in these matters. I notice a sign that celebrates their 25th anniversary. How many burglaries and child births went down in this rectangle? My breakfast is eventually handed to me in a bag, and I wonder the nutritional value of a blueberry New York bagel with sausage, egg, and cheese, and how many seconds it subtracts from my life clock. Too late now. There are two employees near the freezer in the back, frozen as they're locked into their scrolling social media feeds, as multiple telephones ring at the same time. This place is a miracle. Trillions of cultural explosions laid over a gene swram all converged into this hole in the wall bagel shop.

November 2nd, 2022

One free tweet per day
What if everyone gets one free tweet per day, but anything beyond that is paid? And what if the cost of additional tweets depends on the size of your audience? This kind of nuanced system covers both extremes. 1) Twitter is a public good, and everyone should have the right to participate. 2) It's a crazy valuable tool for figures with 100k+ audiences, and they're often accruing millions in value for free.

Dean's List