Year: 2024

Categories
Chronicle

Day 1461 and 2024 Year in Review Posts

And so my fourth year of writing every single day in public comes to a close. I choose to comb through each post by hand to give a round up. I could employ artificial intelligence to give a synopsis and I have run my writing through several AI models.

Still I find it helpful to do the rote work myself. You can see my 2023 round up here. If you’d like further back here is my 2022 round up. And my first year round up is 2021

I felt as if my writing this year was more variable in length, depth & insight but that’s more feeling than fact. It don’t know if I feel like I did my best work this year.

And yet I still found narrowing it down to 50-60 odd posts to be a challenge. I can’t tell if that means I need a new format, a change of pace, or a change in expectations. Maybe it’s fine to keep going and see what happens. As we head to into 2025 feel free to have a look at my 2024. Let me know if you like what you see.

Emotional Work

Day 1449 and Self Deception

Day 1416 and Lagom

Day 1381 and Radical Responsibility

Day 1236 and Art of Accomplishment

Day 1197 and Experiencing Excellence

Day 1149 and Time to Get Offline?

Day 1119 and Capacity for Presence

Day 1107 and Happy Birthday to Matt

Subcultures & Cultural Commentary

Day 1448 and LARPing Ourselves to Death

Day 1441 and The Circuit of Power

Day 1431 and Faking Autism for Clout

Day 1410 and Luxury Content After Institutional Failure

Day 1341 and Class Consciousness

Day 1328 and Weebs as Social Elite

Day 1259 and Cooler Than Me

1232 and Millennial Crab Bucket

1176 and Verner Vinge’s Legacy

Day 1121 and Changing Political Alignments in Young Men

Chaos Energy

Day 1427 and Friction in The Systems

Day 1421 and When Crypto Clashes with Open Source Artificial Intelligence

Day 1417 and Pareto Optimal Skincare

Day 1398 and Overstimulated Nerds

Day 1393 and Babylonian Memetic Death Cults

Day 1386 and Goatse Singularity (safe to click) and Day 1391 Hyper Object Lesson and Day 1387 Singularity Lore

Day 1303 and Toaster Fucker Problem

Day 1297 and Crypto Libertarians in the Age of Anarcho-Tyranny

Day 1173 and Autism Services

Politics

Day 1425 and Doorknockers & Montana’s Senate Race

Day 1405 and America is Speaking

Day 1403 and Legible Political Opinions

Day 1415 and Sliding off The Board

Day 1422 and Material Conditions

Day 1356 and Sick Sad World

Day 1322 and You Can Just Do Things

Day 1315 and Ratfucking Season

Day 1291 and Political Violence

Day 1212 and Being One of Many

Day 1152 and Sunsetting The Boomers

Day 1142 and Come See The Violence Inherent in The System

Day 1103 and Don’t Talk Yourself into Regression

Biohacking

Day 1409 and Red Lights

Day 1290 and Covid Experiment with Nicotine

Day 1168 and Inner Monologue & Meditation

Day 1114 and Zoomers Aging Faster

Day 1107 and Polar Vortex

Goods and Services

Day 1388 and Take Good Care

Day 1362 and Hilux Drip

Day 1342 and SKU Bloat ZIRP

Day 1289 and The Discontinued Pant

Day 1263 and Hoe-flation

Day 1228 and Cotton

Day 1123 and Zombie Media

Day 1118 and Becoming a Distrustful Shopper

Startups

Day 1376 and Q324 Investor Update

Day 1363 and Landfill Apps & 10xing Code

Day 1347 and Economic Paternalism

Day 1320 and Becoming “You-er”

Day 1296 and H1 Investor Update

Day 1251 and Other People’s Labor

Day 1245 and AI Tooling

Day 1230 and Alignment is Consensus

Day 1172 and Inference is Up

Day 1145 and Founder Vitality

Categories
Emotional Work Internet Culture

Day 1460 and Review Process

I began my review of my “round up” for the year post today. I was going post by post dredging memories and taking notes by hand. I’m embarrassed to say it took me almost 7 weeks of post scrolling to realize I was going through 2023 and not 2024.

Now you might argue that I’m tired as it’s been a long year, but just how crazy do things got to be when time is so punctuated with “happenings” that it’s genuinely hard to remember even the most shocking of events?

How is it that wars, elections, and major technological breakthroughs are just the daily happenings? Can it be that this much travel is required to do business? How long have we been living through this acceleration in politics and technology?

I want the narrative through lines of life to be more comprehensible. It is however clear that we are in a roiling period of chaos and even as I may remain ahead of some aspects I’ll always experience a trend multiple times.

Things that were huge this year were trends last year and were mere subcultures the year before that. Such is how information propagates in a networked world. I’m not even fully saturated on my own thesis.

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 1459 and Luxury Habits and Discomfort

I am hoping to achieve some variation or flavor of relaxation before the new year comes in with 2025 and it’s back to full speed chaos.

Convincing my body that relaxation is possible, dare I say even preferable, apparently requires a complex blend of sleep, vitamins, nutrition and the occasional trip to a professional.

I don’t find some of the necessities of feminine grooming terribly relaxing but even a wax and an aggressive pedicure have its capacity to relax.

Getting rid of the ugly baby pink X hooker color I’ve had since Thanksgiving in Los Angeles

Having hairs ripped out of delicate follicles isn’t exactly relaxing but it’s much chiller than the torture tools they use to get your toes appropriately trimmed back.

Winter legs and medieval torture tools

I feel like a Clydesdale with a patient farrier if I don’t get them trimmed every two months or so.

Watch out for the collegen and biotin supplements. They make everything grow faster apparently. I do feel like it was nice to do a little maintenance in the mania. It makes you feel so lucky to be able to have the torture of beauty be a luxury.

Categories
Community Politics

Day 1458 and Ingroup Preference

“one day you’re in, the next you’re out”

Heidi Klum – Project Runway

Twitter is in the middle of a multi-day long information war ostensibly over foreign worker visas in America. It’s about visas in the same way that Gamergate was about “ethics in journalism” if you catch my drift.

The similarities are interesting. It’s a fight over who’s interests are included and prioritized in a lucrative space. If gaming makes money and had that much vitriol involved imagine how much worse it is at the scale of a nation. All power struggles become culture war online.

American, being the aging but dominant geopolitical entity on the planet, is a popular place to be. So naturally the fight for who benefits from America is gnarly as fuck and has a lot of racism.

Who has rights and who benefits from them sounds much grander than video games or fashion but who decides what is “in-group” is existential.

As we experience the Great Reshuffle over the next decade or two, the question of who is protected in a nation state couldn’t be more potent. And human nature means we are viewing it with as much sense as a gaggle of fashion editors. Being part of the in group in America is as ugly a business as any.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1457 and Cultural Values

I really tried to stay out of discourse on Twitter over Christmas break, alas being only human I stupidly decided to wade into discussions about American talent and our disgracefully broken immigration and visa system. It was a mistake.

A debate over type of work visa called the H-1B kicked off days of horrific anti-Indian racism which then created a bizarre backlash insinuating white Americans of having a culture of under-achievement. All over a broken program that brings in 65,000 workers in a country of 300m.

Naturally people are pissed. The whole thing feels like it was designed to manufacture a schism between factions of the Republican Party as it touched some very raw nerves.

The “precariat” of lower middle class professional Americans took sucker punches from anonymous account and also Vivek Ganapathy Ramaswamy for having bad cultural values which has affected our willingness to compete for excellence.

Maybe someone else will remember this but I recall an incident during my childhood when Bill Cosby got canceled (no not for that) over statements suggesting that some portions of poor black American cultural values were not promoting success and achievement.

If we had a similar cultural figure in white American that said something equivalent we’d probably get the same backlash as no one likes to hear told that they need to work on themselves. And in general people definitely don’t want to hear their flaws from someone who acts like their betters.

I think the bigger question is how is it that we found our values of hard work and achievement degraded. What has happened in our schools and in our workplaces that we are not aspiring to better ourselves. That’s where the heart of the issue is most tender and for good reason.

Categories
Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1456 and Altered Window of Immunity

You ever push yourself so hard (physically, emotionally, mentally) that you crash afterwards? This is a common human experience. It’s called an altered window of immunity. Over exert yourself and you get sick.

I’ve come to understand the Christmas Break period as my yearly window of altered immunity. One reason I like to fast during the Holy Nights is to bring down my own physical and emotional reactivity.

When basic functions feel stressful and even small involuntary processes like digestion feel inflammatory then the work of living feels toxic. At that point one hopes rest is enough to get it out of your system.

The human tendency to ignore small problems until they become big problems is surely part of a wider cycle of disease. We wait to rest and repair till it’s too late and find ourselves crashing. For everyone bobbing along on the waves of life be sure to take a deep breath before plunging back under. It just might save your life.

Categories
Culture

Day 1455 and Holy Nights

I used to have a habit of extended fasting during the Holy Nights. I would fast for ten days between Christmas and New Years though never all the way through to Epiphany.

I have no special Christmas traditions beyond worship as my own family does not do gifts or gatherings. I prefer it this way. Quiet suits me now.

Advent is a season for reflection on the cycles of life. For me the time between Christmas and Epiphany is a rare season. Some consider it a liminal time or still point where the veil between physical and other realities are thin.

Holy Nights can be thought of as a still-point in earthly rhythms as we transition from Christ’s Birth to Epiphany. Northern European cultures call it this time the Raunächte or “rough nights” similarly it represents the thin point between worlds.

There are many traditions associated with this time. Cleaning and cleansing and warding off bad or unwanted energy, the paying off of debts and reconciliation as well as rituals of burning, cleansing and smudging. It’s a time for introspection and reflection.

I’ll likely meditate and journal as normal perhaps with some divination exercises. I enjoy any excuse to pull tarot cards and toss a Nordic rune.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1454 and The Meek Shall Inherit The Earth

I’m so unsure of how the next decade or two will play out. Anyone with a firm degree of certainty on the matter is suspect in my mind.

History is alive and material progress rests on the intelligent coordination of resources. We are in the middle of an explosion of intelligence. Will we rise to the challenge as a species?

I’ve had a wild year. I suspect many others feel similarly. The global year of elections exposed many tensions even as it resolved some questions of who has the power and how it will be used.

I’m more optimistic than I expected to be at the start of the year. We are living inside William Gibson’s Jackpot. As intelligence explodes and my own capacity to coordinate with others improves I am hopeful.

It’s Christmas Eve which puts me in a reflective mood. Changes in human nature are rare. If we change at all, it happens over generations of incorporating cultural change as it is combined with significant changes in technical and material circumstance.

Christ’s birth represents a significant cultural change for humans. From low circumstances arose a new way of living. The mighty see the grace of the meekest among us.

As we meditate on the values our ancestors worked to build into civilization, do we have the capacity to set aside our pride in the face of change? May we humbly seek redemption in the mysteries of time.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1453 and Shopping Malls at Christmas

I partook in the time honored tradition of going to a mall before Christmas. My family was inconsistent in its treatment of the holiday when I was growing up and consumerism was not a value we celebrated.

And yet now I think it’s a wonder America has exported the triumph of the American consumer at its most intense and made Christmas shopping a mentality globally. Consumer debt is a marvelous when it’s priced in American dollars.

Our holidays are now times for displaying status and taste in so much of the world. I think it’s reasonable to say we’ve been post scarcity since the mass commercial fertilizer and it’s all been status signaling since then. We all live materially better lives. Arguments for the impoverishment of our souls are still quite valid.

Yet here I am buying stuff before Christmas. Nothing makes me feel more like a piece of the capital markets like buying consumer electronics at Christmas.

The prices are better only because we’ve been trained into a consistent purchasing pattern. We can predict consumer sentiment and meet those demands partially as a function of training the consumer when to shop. The propaganda of the markets.

So I get to enjoy the overstimulating existential horror that is the wall of televisions ready to be Christmas gifts. The high fidelity color and intense noise is an assault on the senses. No wonder reality is a disappointment. I’ve never seen so crisp a picture. It’s all just a bit too much.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

1452 and Bone Deep Weather

When the weather begins a shift to wet, cold or otherwise stormy, I feel it like some poor grandmother in a folktale.

My joints begin to ache, I feel swelling across my fascia and my ankylosis pain intensifies. Why do joints hurt when a storm system moves in? We’ve got a couple plausible explanations for all too common phenomena.

Barometric Pressure Changes: Before a rainstorm, barometric pressure (the weight of the air) typically drops. This decrease in external pressure can allow tissues surrounding the joints to expand.

Humidity and Inflammation: Rainy weather often brings high humidity, which may worsen inflammation in joints, particularly for those with conditions like arthritis.

Thanks to Perplexity the bone deep discomfort of a storm front becomes much easier to understand.

Cold conditions can stiffen joints by thickening the synovial fluid that lubricates them. Reduced blood circulation may also contribute. Changes in weather can make nerves more sensitive which amplifying pain signals.

The remedies for these changes are pretty basic. Stay warm, get your blood flowing with some light exercise, stay hydrated, stretch and take anti-inflammatory medications like NSAIDs to mitigate discomfort.

I asked Grok to draw me as a cyborg granny out in front of a storm

Prompted Grok to draw me as an arthritic cyborg granny in a rocking chair waiting and watching as a storm comes in.