I’ve written about my love of road trips and in particular the Eisenhower interstate highway a few times. If a destination is within a day’s drive in the west, it’s often worth piling into our trusty Subaru and heading for the hills.
Heading to the West Yellowstone entrance through beautiful Madison County Montana
With a portable mini-Starlink, you can work from even the most remote corners of the mountain west. Nothing is quite so satisfying as being in some of America’s most remote areas and having enough connectivity on call if it is needed.
Driving hundreds of miles in a day is often more enjoyable than attempting to fly and you can take in rolling hills and jagged mountain tops without the haste of the TSA rummaging in your bags and needing to show up hours ahead of time. The open road is freedom in the psyche of Americans.
I’ve done this in Europe as well where the infrastructure is not quite as well suited to this type of transit. There are more borders to manage and no consistent roadways.
Europeans generally seem to regard my fondness for road-trips as selfish folly though I rarely do them alone. I’m almost always with friends and my husband.
The freedom to traverse easily over some of the world’s most beautiful land is a privilege. to see rolling green hills and bright sky as spring overtakes the mountain west is just about the best way I can imagine spending a day.
It’s hard not to feel like you are drowning when you open up a newsfeed. Every day you are watching people on tilt across every topic and demographic. Is this the singularity?
The doomers and Luddites are being courted by money with shadowy religious grants to “prepare for the dangers of super intelligence.”
I go outside and I breathe in the cool Montana air and I am settled by the almost impossible beauty of the mountains out our pasture. If you hike out to the public fields before the canyon you can see the whole valley spread out before you.
Public lands out my backdoor that look like a Microsoft Windows Screen saver
After a weekend snowfall, the grass is coming in spring green and the sky is as bright a blue as a screensaver. The resolution of reality has yet to be surpassed but I don’t know for how long that will be true and if it’s even true for most people.
It’s impossible not to feel as if one is being torn apart as each successive wave of new information comes at you. It’s all on tilt. It’s all faster. It’s all getting better. Or is it all a horror? It depends on the wave.
If you refresh at the wrong moment it’s all getting worse. What about the Vatican and their new encyclical from Pope Leo? Industrial Revolution Leo? Nah Intelligence Revolution Leo. Anthropic is sending a vegan atheist as their emissary.
“You best start believing in singularities!” Cthulhu Dread Pirate by way of ChatGPT Image 2.0 reminds us as we just might be in one. Do we dare laugh back? “This is the day you will always remember as the day you almost caught Captain Jack Sparrow (in a Singularity).”
In other house keeping news, I’ll be driving from the mountains to the desert to participate in the Operation Gigawatt Summit in Park City Utah later this week. If we are accelerating into a new future of intelligence, someone has to provide the power and the compute. And that’s my crew. Lots and lots of white boys apparently.
No one likes a gloomy Gus. The downside of chronicling a chronic disease is the risk of seeing yourself as only the illness. Then other people will see you that way too. And so your identity becomes tied with only one of the many aspects of your life, and often the worst one at that.
Thankfully most humans are centered enough on themselves to forget the occasional gloomy reality from someone outside of their daily lives.
But repetition becomes reality, and eventually we are who we believe ourselves to be because others believe we are who we say we are too.
I came across a startup who is working on one of those classic swamp problems that seems like a great idea until you are well and truly stuck in the muck with bad incentives and no good solutions.
They want to use artificial intelligence to help patients with chronic diseases or complex medical cases to codify the many little details that might add up to the clues that crack the case.
By tracking subject inputs (unstructured data) and overlaying it with the other biometrics gathered by wearables and bloodwork they can help patients. I’ve seen hundreds of variants of this over the years.
Alas this new startup seems to have discovered a flywheel for marketing that relies on the problem I began today’s post with. We believe what we tell ourselves we are and eventually other people will believe what we believe.
They have chosen to market the app with illness influencers. Yes, that’s an actual category of influencer on TikTok and Instagram. Hot girls all have vague chronic illnesses these days haven’t you noticed?
And so a community forms and reinforces the identity that they all share. They are sick. And that makes them special. This gives life meaning. And did I mention lots of pretty girls have the most esoteric and exiting problems? Click to join now!
I find this to be a troubling, even borderline dangerous, approach to anchoring a community meant to help patients advocate better for care with their own personal health records. The incentive to remain with the privileged identity that makes them special only increases over time. Women reinforce themselves into intensely held identities all the time.
I thought about reaching out to them but I don’t want to get tangled with this problem. It is one for professionals which neither myself nor these founders are aside from everyone being a patient with chronic illness.
I do not wish for my identity to be the sick woman. The woman whose life was upended by a fertility protocol gone wrong in the early years of her marriage and in the prime of her life.
It’s one aspect of my reality. I do want others to be saved from my fate so I share it. But it is not who I am. Julie is not a sick woman. Julie is a complicated individual with a beautiful life and family and portfolio.
I had my own glimmer of hope today. Though I have repeated my troubles with my medical history I have never felt it was my identity. I’d happily give it up if I find a path to wellness. And I spend so much of my life trying to walk out of my troubles.
I have walked many side roads and pursued quixotic quests to find health. And some days I even find it. Today I got very good news on a fresh round of bloodwork. I’ve felt recently felt well thanks to some changes and an aggressive pursuit of new modalities.
I never want to get my hopes up too high as this effort has been a rollercoaster of ups and downs. But I won’t let go of the hope. The mere idea that this chapter could close and I might be a healthy woman is an identity I’d gladly welcome. And I’d wish that for anyone who takes on illness as a part of their identity.
It’s funny that whenever I should have a particularly good week I am inevitably presented with pain and a bad day. And today was a bad day.
I woke up starving at 5am for no reason. Everything hurt. My skin was peeling and I was freezing. A snowstorm barreled in overnight which was cause for some distress and an awkward moment of uncertainty as whether our spring chickens could weather the storm. It’s their first full week out of the barn and in the outdoor coop and the smallest one is still so very little. They did great but they were not happy about it.
Our five new pullets who are snowed in on the first week outside the barn
I also got a sad bit of news about a company that I had witnessed being birthed through its early years as a direct to consumer darling. My first boss had been on its board and their technical cofounder was a college friend who also worked with my prior boss.
If one is to believe the reporting it was sold in debt to a large foreign company whose own brand is the antithesis of what the startup has meant to its customers. It was the first and last of the direct to consumer companies.
I don’t wish to make anyone sadder than they already are about it and I am saddened common stock holders get nothing. It’s a common story in the space and it hurts to see every time.
So I went and bought a bunch of basics in memory of what the company had tried to be and in a show of mourning as I do not trust the new owners to maintain quality.
That’s a common story in all consumer categories now. One is sometimes let down by growing too quickly or raising too much too fast and I have so much sadness in my heart that reality. It was the end of an era.
Women are at a bit of a disadvantage to men when it comes to relieving ourselves. Yes I am talking about taking a piss.
From road trips to the backcountry, we’re forced to hike up our skirts (or worse shimmy down our pants) and aim our stream through squat & thrust such that it lands where we desire without soiling our garments or surrounding areas.
You might be wondering why I’ve got such a urological topic on my mind. And I might remind you it is not as if my writing lacks for lewd colloquialisms. Some readers may recall my viral hit “dick riding” so if you are inclined towards Freud we can have a chuckle about penis envy. And today it might even be true.
I am at the moment stuck in a literal can. I am nearing the end of a session of hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy. To be specific, my 27th session on my second round of the therapy. My first round of it was forty sessions last fall. I am rounding the end of my second set in the next two weeks.
I happen to feel dare I say good this most recent round of HBOT. It’s a marvel what it can do for the lungs and for healing wounds. However I can’t credit my current upswing just to the oxygen I’m breathing in while under two atmospheres of pressure.
I have gone off my biological injection Bimzelx after a frightful year of infections despite its excellent ability to squash down inflammatory biometrics like CRP and sed rate. I’ve added in hormone therapy via testosterone and estradiol pellets (also my second round of them). The big change is that I am heading into my forth week of injecting experimental peptides.
Those had a hell of an adjustment, but seem to have done absolutely everything which was claimed by their champions in terms of anti-inflammatory benefits. Alas I am not sure if I should discuss them too much lest I get in trouble for being ahead of the insurance rackets. My doctor supervised and approved of them which should be good enough but one never knows.
That was a long way of saying that this combination of discontinuing old expensive therapies and adding in new cheaper less expensive treatments is adding up to a lot more mobility and capacity for me.
So today I went hiking and I lifted weights. Actual under the bar squats in my own rack like an actual human. The kind of active life that I’ve been desperately trying to regain for years.
So I’ve drank rather a lot of water today. More than perhaps I should have, as here I am in a pressurized can absolutely desperately wishing I could urinate.
Alas I am waiting the timer praying for decompression to arrive so I can relieve myself in a proper water closest. And thus we circle back to the penis envy.
It’s just that I have an empty can in here with me, it’s not out of the question I could find relief in that manner. Perhaps I’d have a better treatment. My heart rate is higher than I’d like and my bladder is unhappy about the pressure. But I’ve got no aim and little room for error.
Just imagine the smell. If urine smells in a well ventilated area like a roadside rest stop, just imagine how it might smell in a pressurized tube. It’s not a place you want to fart I’ll tell you that much. So wetting the blankets, upholstery, and my clothing in here would be a disaster. I’d never get the smell out.
So here I am laughing to myself about wanting to piss in a can. Maybe a good reminder to buy one of those hiking helper devices for women. You never know what kind of situation I may find myself in this summer if I can actually move my body comfortably again.
Not so long ago (*gulp* five years or so) as I first began investing out of our chaotic.capital vehicle, I would discuss our thesis in terms like thriving in a world of increasingly accelerating complexity. That trajectory inevitably leads to chaos.
How does one make money and start fast growing businesses in a world where entropy must be fought at every turn and the rules are constantly changing?
There are a million metaphors and I’m sure all have been used by now. One must surf the chaos or risk being caught under wave after wave of punishing swells.
Next thing I know the world is talking about chaos constantly. And it’s always accelerating.
The implication? Chaos! China’s leader went so far as to invoke my beloved Thucydides, warning of the trap that arises between two powers. Yes, Xi mentioned the Thucydides Trap in the recent summit with Trump.
The term was popularized by Harvard political scientist Graham Allison in the early 2010s, drawing on the ancient Greek historian Thucydides. His argument: when a rising power challenges an established one, conflict inevitably follows.
Americans may not like the presumptive idea of a rising power challenging our existing power, but these days it’s hard not to be skeptical of American power and its limits.
After all, the acceleration of chaos globally is partially in response to our inability to manage the complexity of our systems. We seem unable to plan ahead. But if we’d like to find a win-win scenario that doesn’t end in a Peloponnesian War we might wish to find a way to learn to live with the chaos lest the trap close its mouth on all of us.
The more the power we seem to gain working with large language models, the more apparent it is that few of us are visually literate in a meaningful way. When you hear talk about design, it is all too often moods and vibes with no specifics.
Now, you might say that you know what you like when you see it. That’s also how we let the Supreme Court talk about porn. Clearly untangling the weft and weave of taste (and by extension culture) can be further articulated than through subjective, non-definitional standards.
How you came to your visual reference preference set is quite a bit more complicated than whatever pre-digested piece of media came across your algorithmic feed.
You can explore design languages from one token to the next, but visual literacy involves a lot more than scrolling or confirming you’d like to see more content “like this.”
Edward Tufte taught data analysis and public policy as a professor at Princeton and Yale for 31 years.
Tufte, via his Graphics Press, wrote, designed, and self-published 5 books on analytical thinking and showing, taught a one-day course, Presenting Data and Information for 923 days to 328,001 students.
Who knew Tufte and I both shared a love of marking the days of our work? He influenced many more people than I have but I find some joy in that coincidence.
His most referenced work, which I mentioned above was published in 2001. Visual Display of Quantitative Information was on the desks of everyone designer I knew, from fashion and Silicon Valley to public policy it was a mainstay. The man knew how to lay out information visually and he became the standard.
Some of Tufte’s self published tomes
The long tail of enthusiasm for displaying data beautifully surely owes its ubiquity in some part due to his success in teaching my generation’s designers.
He’s became for a period so universally referenced that Tufte became a cliche. Now he’s classic a quarter century later. His work arguably as successful as a visual language reference anchor as bookshelf favorite, “The Design of Everyday Things” by Donald Norman. His work is also denigrated as cliche in some circles.
The Design of Everyday Things second book cover
Both men offered clarity and practical principles over taste and theory. Those academic predecessors befuddled many who experienced aesthetics primarily through semiotics and critical theory. It felt revolutionary to return to form and function
You “Kant” really learn to love the languages of aesthetics from theory alone as it turns out. I’ll place a little AI synopsis to make the connection clear. This is from Perplexity:
Someone might relate to the popularity of Edward Tufte and The Design of Everyday Things as part of a broader hunger for clarity over clutter in how information and objects are presented.
Tufte’s work is influential because it treats visual design as a serious vehicle for understanding data, while Norman’s book argues that everyday things should be intuitive, legible, and centered on the user.
A Tufte-style chart removes decoration so the trend is easy to read, while a Norman-style kettle shows clearly how to fill it and pour it without guessing.
Both are forms of respect for the user: one respects the reader’s attention, the other respects the user’s actions.
Learning how to use an item or a tool, or how to interpret charts or graphics, can easily overwhelm anyone and feel disrespectful to students. A whole era of computing was stuck between the power of the command line and the legibility of the desktop metaphor.
Norman spoke of the Gulf of Execution as the gap between a user’s goal and the means to execute that goal. Tufte similarly wished to remove the confusion in charts and graphs so one’s ability to glean information wasn’t stuck in a gulf of understanding thanks to overwrought bar chart or sankey diagram.
With new artificial intelligence tools we are bridging some of that gap, not with design but with raw computing power. We are moving beyond the CLI and the desk and into a world of reference and inference.
I just hope we all take the time to learn our reference set so we can do more than say “I know it when I see it” as that will be our only way across the gulf of execution. Some things never change. Learning the languages of your field is one of them.
I’m in my luteal phase so primed to be grumpy, frumpy and otherwise combative. You’d think this wouldn’t be an issue as I’m currently experimenting with synthetic hormones and all sorts of experimental peptides but the feminine is a mystery.
Thankfully this cunty attitude had a positive side effect of spiraling me into a group chat debate over what constitutes couture. Haute couture literally means “high sewing” or “high dressing making” in French.
I just had to be technically correct as it’s the best kind of correct. I only know as once upon a time I picked a fight with Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode aka La Chambre Syndicale as old school fashionistas tend to still call it.
I may have done a kind of DDOS (allegedly) on their publicity fax machines to get their attention to further my guerrilla reporting efforts. They were not amused by the chron job I set to send them regular faxes at specific intervals. Anyways.
The TLDR is essentially that what constitutes couture is a bit like champagne. It only counts if it’s from the ateliers of Paris with very specific artisans (and a number of them) using hand sewn techniques which sell only to private clients with custom fittings. They then approve your atelier if you meet these standards.
Couture is not custom made clothing nor is it a form of luxury determined by price or self labeling. And it is definitely not “ready to wear” clothing you can buy off the runway. If an elaborate dance of craftsmanship and French bureaucracy. As an American I find it a bit silly but I don’t care for cartels of any kind be it drug, oil or clothing.
Many designers will try to get away with calling a custom made item couture in order to ride on the 170 year aura of French fashions but it’s not really what is meant by couture and it’s absolutely not what is meant by haute couture.
You don’t see Savile Row tailors calling themselves couture designers nor should they. That would be silly and imprecise. They are Savile Row tailors and that’s its own special custom suiting process.
Being imprecise in one’s specifications is exactly the opposite of what you’d want from someone making you a custom wardrobe based upon nearly two centuries of a professional cartel’s specifications.
So please don’t call something couture as a short hand slang for custom design. It may be ready to wear. It may be tailored to you. But only those who meet the standards of the Chambre Syndicale carry the designation haute couture. Otherwise it’s just sparkling custom made clothing.
My father loved gadgets. He was always tinkering with something and was always upgrading his electronics to some new specification.
Is it any wonder that I married such a handy husband? Men love futzing around with stuff. Sometimes they have daughters and then you’ve got women like to mess around with projects too.
I am sure we will have endless rounds of nostalgia for the eighties and nineties era gadget, electronics and novelty shops. You could get lots of mileage out of building your own computer.
But even setting up something silly from Skymall or Sharper Image captured some of the joy. The novelty of a new invention was visceral. I wouldn’t say no to a Hammacher Schlemmer renaissance myself.
I didn’t love it when we remade that style of retail into quirk chungus millennial fandom but I didn’t hate getting Star Trek tchotchkes either. And now I dearly love websites that my friends have built like WireCutter.
My husband was humming the tune to a piece of YouTube esoterica that is a deep cut to the original editor of that bastion of shopping guides. Choire Sicha launched the WireCutter but it’s in some ways the least soulful of his franchises. A Mike Albo shopping column already nailed thebit we’ve just been redeeming it since then.
Choire gave us Gawker 2.0 before his his incredible era of independent publishing streak making properties like the Awl and the Hairpin.
In a world with more shops and essayists than good shoppers or readers, Choire found the good ones and shared. And one of his discoveries was Nina Katchadourian’s work.
I’m sure we will enter an exciting new era of curating down the perfect piece of cultural detritus with artificial intelligence. But I will always be grateful to electronics dads and savvy buying guides for teaching me to enjoy the joy in making something. Even if it is profoundly uncool. I’m still team Barbara Kruger though. Don’t believe the hypebeasts.
I am not up for the nostalgia festival around The Devil Wears Prada. It’s funny to have been in the fashion industry as the world of high gloss fashion magazines was rising in the public eye. It was ironically just as the business of publishing was about to be upended by technological change.
I never did take a job at Condé Nast, though I have some great stories. But I have enjoyed the largess of being inside a fashion brand with a closet. Nothing can fix a day like changing your look without spending a dime. Just “shop” the closet!
If a fashion closet doesn’t appeal to you, imagine a beauty closet. I was on the public relations gifting list for MAC during several of its glory years. I still treasure the packaging. Once I had my own beauty brand, I was swimming in samples that were far less polished but no less enjoyable.
So today that was the happy memory on my mind as I pulled together samples for a friend from my own beauty closet. who is about to go on tour for their work.
Finding just the right colors, chemicals and packaging for her needs was such a joy. I still love the hunt for just the right item that will work. From blazers to retinols, the closet contains fixes to almost all style problems. The bigger problems in life never have a quick fix so it’s worth treasuring the joy of the closet rummage.
