Author: Julie

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 1747 and Hyper Autistic Protestant Work Ethic Beauty Blog

I spent some time being really “in my special interest” today writing about why I think we should give more, and not less, time to beauty. I’ll post it to my new substack tomorrow as that will remain focused in subject matter.

Appearances clearly matter in every facet of life, but we don’t do much to help develop taste even as we face an onslaught of the hyper visual unrealistic world of short form video.

It’s all dopamine drips and quick hits that make it hard to develop taste of your own. At best you found algorithms that suited some things you could enjoy but sincerely held joy is rare. I’ve been able to experience many times and it’s now one keeps going in a cruel world.

I spent so much of my life beating the drumbeat of more access to the secret knowledge of the world only to discover again and again, that even if you offer up to the world pearls, not everyone will want them.

Or as my mother liked to say her Latin teacher said “I’m throwing pearl’s before swine!”

To appreciate the details is to recognize that layer upon layer of irritation worked to a finished pearlescent sheen which seems too delicate to truly show the process. That’s its beauty.

Each layer of culture is built by people who cares about details. And all kinds of details matter. Sometimes the details are financial. Sometimes aesthetic. Sometimes it’s noticing a very specific signal inside a very particular group and being able to admire the elegances.

I myself didn’t think I ever much went in for subtlety of any kind until I spent more of my time in mass markets. I’ve come to realize I was allowed to live without too much push on my own tastes for so much of my life.

And because I care about details, now I know I a stupid amount about the business of appearances because I worked at its heart.

So naturally I’d like to do more to share that knowledge as I realize it is maybe much rarer than I realized.

I intend to do it as a fun addition to my life as I experience so much of life through professional and personal interest in technologies. I’ve got aspirations for a world where we choice to work to be better. That requires a world where beauty can be cultivated in improving ourselves. so you can be certain I appreciate the angles of how we use the existing culturally technologies at hand to create the new ones.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1746 and Processed Pizza Hangover

Yesterday was my birthday and we celebrated it in grand style and semi- tradition by spending two hours walking every single aisle of Costco.

Now you might think all that walking around would leave your body feeling invigorated, and honestly it did, but we finished our grand tour by eating at the Costco food court. Now there are probably ways to eat healthy there but not how we did it.

We went for the classics including the dollar fifty hot dog and soda combination (a bulwark against inflation that has stood longer than seems possible) a slice of pepperoni pizza, a strawberry smoothie and a chocolate chip cookie. I had the pizza, some of the smoothie and half the cookie while Alex had the hotdog, a root beer, the rest of the smooth and a little bit of the cookie.

Our mutual and biohacker in chief Bryan Johnson gifted me a birthday roast of this meal. Which was not only hilariously funny but absolutely true.

Happy Birthday.

We didn’t feel immediately worse but we woke up today with what I’d qualify as a hangover. We can enjoy the above roasting as we generally don’t eat junk food and when we do it’s in more of the local beef category than the hyper processed and hyper preserved category.

Before you think this is a show of virtue, this preference never did anything for my aesthetics or metabolism, it’s just that it always makes me feel bad.

I am quite sensitive to preservatives and refuse to eat most forms of American bread and most varieties of prepared meal. No matter how good the ingredients are, the preservatives just do not agree with me.

It’s not that I’m a healthy eater naturally so much as hyper palatable foods are often hyper preserved foods and that sends my histamine response soaring into cytokine storms. So it’s no wonder I woke up feeling hungover.

I did real damage to myself as Bryan pointed out. We had a lovely time and I like to think the joy and happiness reduced our cortisol enough to bring us some balance. But it was easy to quit drinking for the same reason as it is easy to quit fast food. You feel like shit afterwards.

One of the most amusing fights I recall my parents having was my father taking my kindergarten class to tour a Carl’s Jr kitchen. They gave us a kid’s meal at the end, and while I turned up my nose at the burger, I did eat the french fried potatoes. My very crunchy and wise mother was not happy. “Now she will have a taste for French Fries!”

And damned if she wasn’t right. I still haven’t ever eaten a fast food hamburger. The idea of it is revolting to me and I’ve no clue how that came to be programmed in me. I may be one of the few people in America who has never eaten a Big Mac. But I love french fries. And good potatoes fried in a decent oil never leaves me feeling awful. But bread that doesn’t go moldy? That gives me a hangover every time.

Categories
Aesthetics Biohacking

Day 1745 and a Very Costco Birthday

Alex and I love a Costco date. The beloved warehouse cooperative sells bulk goods and the luxury surprises to its members at fair prices. It remains a top notch place to enjoy time together in search of treasure. Which is why we choose it for my birthday celebration today.

We got some groceries, walked every single aisle, found surprise and delight, and wracked up a couple thousand steps indoors in rainy weather

A birthday date inside Costco in ok

I don’t know quite how we started on the Costco date. It was probably one of our preparedness habits as we check our stocks and resupply as basics get used up and items expire. But Costco is also about the hunt. This Pendleton throw is a fine birthday present.

The seasonal arrivals for Halloween were still going strong but we saw Christmas ready to go. Thanksgiving hasn’t popped up yet but we did see a turkey order form.

You also learn a lot about the biggest trends in health and wellness as their supplement and beauty aisles are the stuff of legend. Creatine and collagen have hit the big time for men and women and everyone is thinking about hormones.

DHEA is a better mix but adaptogens are good

Now the real coup de grace of a Costco trip is the food court. Which is never the caliber of high quality and healthy that you can get in other areas. But it does make for excellent birthday party food.

I had a slice a pizza, half a strawberry smooth and half a cookie
The famed $1.50 hot dog

Alex got himself the infamous hotdog and turned it into a proper Chicago style dog with onions and relish and mustard. I won’t eat encased meats myself.

Our Twitter friends were following along as we posted pictures from each aisle with comments about commodities pricing, cosmetics merchandising and other sundry topics. And as an added treat Bryan Johnson roasted our birthday meal

Julie, a good learning experience. These 2,050 calories will cause a massive insulin spike followed by a post-meal crash. Increased hunger 3-4 hr later. Your arteries constrict and blood vesselsl stiffen. The nitrites are a group 1 carcinogen (increased colorectal cancer risk). Acute oxidative stress. Impaired endothelial function by 20-40% for several hours. Gut microbiome will shift towards pro-inflammatory Firmicutes, an obesity-like profile. The dopamine spike from fat+sugar+salt mimics an addiction reward pathway. Repeated, will desensitize dopamine receptors causing you to escalate stimulation to achieve the same pleasure.
Happy Birthday.

Contemplating life choices is the perfect way to enjoy the day. Plus how great does this new blanket look on our couch?

Categories
Aesthetics Biohacking

Day 1744 and A Yenta For Your Perfect Look

I am considering doing more writing, but instead of it being an exercise in creating more, I am interested in writing about how to consume well, so meet Nice Packaging, a beauty shopping column with a b side about the business of keeping up appearances.

Background on why I want to do this is below, but if you want to be a part of it getting started, I’m going to offer “founding members” for it live 1:1 time with me to craft your perfect routine. Details here

Background

I get a fair amount of joy out of being the person in my social group who everyone goes to for advice on what to buy in the areas where I am most expert. I sort of wish it just could be just category (cosmetics would probably top the list ) but I’ve developed a wide range of interests as I’ve cultivated my tastes over the years so I’m just as likely to be asked what supplements I take for my biohacking as I am to be asked for skincare and cosmetic recommendations.

Chronic disease offers very transparent revealed preferences as I do what works best for my health. A a long career in the style industry means I’ve learned a lot and how to apply it as looking good is often a side effect of feeling good.

I have been in wellness my whole career as it’s not just a matter of having clean clear skin and long hair (though I mostly do) but having been inside the corporate sanctums of everywhere from Goop to Equinox. I learned a lot sourcing for my own makeup brand and I’ve applied the depth of knowledge I have in cosmeceuticals to my own healing as naturally we humans pay more for beauty than we do for health. The cosmetics industry is often light years ahead of standard medical practice.

Other topics I will play with may be more esoteric. I oddly well informed on preparedness thanks to our Montana off grid lifestyle. I’m regularly asked about stocking pharmaceuticals and first kits as those wellness worlds overlap with chronic disease, biohacking and family preparedness. Wellness goes hand in hand with fighting for your own life.

I still travel a great deal so I’ve got travel and packing optimization stories and preferences for days. Having once owned a cosmetics brand that specialized in on-the-go makeup, I can tell you now to pack what you need to look good for any scenario from surviving O’Hare with your family to packing black tie makeup that fits through London Heathrow’s quart bag nightmare.

And finally as an avid reader in the go-to gal for science fiction and reading lists which isn’t as likely to go with the rest but I’m shockingly well read in the genre. And no I don’t mean romantasy. I read hard sci-fi from cyperpunk to space opera. Thinking about what will be popular in the future means living on the cutting edge taste of the right now.

I’ll maintain my daily blog here as this is me time or me space or whatever you might like to call it. I enjoy having the space to ramble about continental philosophy, internet cultural subgroups and their fascinating ecosystems, my own emotional work and becoming version of myself that makes me happy and healthiest.

So I’ll be considering what all this looks like, editorial cadences and how I will integrate which portions of those varied interests into what is most likely going to be a style blog.

Get Started with Me

I can also use your help in getting this off the ground, so I’m offering something special – if you join as a “Founding Member” for the first year (for $300), I’ll spend an hour with you, coming up with your perfect skincare or cosmetics routine, and even send you some products to get started with. And btw, this can be just as helpful for men as for women.

One of my greatest pleasures is putting together cosmetic routines for my friends to test and trial to get you exactly what works for them. I’ve done this for billionaires and working class dollar store shoppers so I promise you I know the market.

I typically do an intake session with you with a questionnaire and some one-one time where we yap about your look, your hopes for them and your ambitions. Then I go over all of your preferences, allergies and issues. With that in mind I create a month or so of samples total for us to experiment with.

I’ll prepare your routine from either my personal brand library of travel sizes (which is enormous) or I decant into sample containers creams, serums, lotions and lotions into one perfect routine. Don’t worry I’m a germaphobe autist.

My goal is to make a routine that matches your skin & hair, and bodily needs perfectly with hour preferences. Things like daily simplicity or complete looksmaxxing, your budget from drugstore to luxury, your comfort level with different kinds of return on investment from Pareto optimization to no routine is too much. And then you test it out and we refine it together. I’m like a yenta for your grooming.

Sign Up Here

Categories
Chronicle Travel

Day 1743 and Noticing Anarcho-Tyranny Through Habits

I’m coming up on the 5-year mark of writing every single day. It doesn’t feel like I’ve been at it that long, if I’m honest with myself. When you commit to doing a basic task as a daily habit, you don’t expect it to change your life.

I’m not actually sure that writing every day has changed my life, though I think I’ve gotten better at the process of writing and the habit of finding space to think, organize, and get my thoughts together. That is a positive change.

When I first started, there were a number of goals I had in my life that seemed a lot more achievable than half a decade of writing.

Once you’ve achieved such consistency, you notice how little gets done in other areas when you regularly do things for yourself. One of my goals that I’ve had almost as long as this blog was a visa for family friends so they could travel freely to America to see me just as I see them. Pandemics and problematic presidents sure slowed that down and now I despair it will ever happy.

I honestly had no idea that the United States was so broken in its state capacity that granting a travel visas would consume more time than blogging and I’d achieve much less working to obtain a visa for years as its functionally impossible to get a legal visa.

Here I am with all of this writing (fantastic training date for an artificial intelligence) and yet I’d still have failed at obtaining a travel visa for family friends. We have so much power and yet not quite enough to get around America’s failures.

Maybe this is why projects like the Network State appealed to me. I’ve worked on policy like the Right to Compute which has taken on more and more meaning as I go through my life.

I can’t believe I was able to pass a bill into law before I could get the state department to do its job. And government workers wonder why some of us wouldn’t mind if they got fired.

I know I can rely on my own skills, my capacity to use the hardware and software at my disposal, and that the currencies of the web will happily engage with me in trustless and transparent manners.

This is not something I can guarantee when working with the United States and our State Department. It’s a hard thing to look at straight on as it traps me and my family into a kind of anarcho-tyranny where because we follow the law to the letter we are discriminated against while others brazenly broke laws.

High trust people who display their commitment daily are worn down by this bitterly painful reality that what we put in doesn’t guarantee us all that much when the state is concerned. We move fast and keep at it. The American state department moves slow and failed at every step of the way.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1742 and Ensorcelled

My mother’s great passion is children’s literature. She is a Waldorf teacher & minor luminary in the world who started several schools.

She believed that there were texts which are “medicine for the soul” which teach children through the enchantment of stories.

Sometimes a story is the only thing that can save your life – back cover of Ensorcelled by Eliot Peper

She raised me with many amazing stories from Grimm’s fairytales to Madeleine L’Engle. Michael Ende and J M Barre were the storytellers which taught me to love reading and left in my heart the joys of literature through stories of adventure & growth.

J.M Barre’s Peter Pan in Kensington Garden and Peter Pang and Wendy. Michel Ende’s Momo and Eliot Pepe’s Ensorcelled

It is with great pleasure I read Eliot Peper’s enchanting novella Ensorcelled. It’s part coming of age story meetings great adventure in the wilds and a delight for young at heart & young readers of literature.

I don’t know if he meant it as a story to be enjoyed by children, as it was such a delight for me as an adult that I went through it in one sitting. Though I do think it would be wonderful reading for young people.

It’s a beautiful printing so you might be inclined to want to keep it pristine but it’s perfect for an afternoon outside. Maybe go touch grass with it in hand. Find the enchantment for yourself.

I’ve been a fan of Peper’s science fiction so it was a real change of pace to see his range. I felt lucky to have an early copy and I genuinely enjoyed its spirit. I went I was going to read a near future thriller and got joy & delight. Which I very much needed.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture Media Politics

Day 1741 and Land Acknowledgment

I’m a bit beat down and experiencing some type of sundowner type pain so apologies that I don’t have a tidy synopsis or incisive commentary to add to the great Nick Land kerfuffle that has gripped right wing and Christian discourse over the last few days. I do however have some thoughts as an active participant & practitioner in futurism.

The TLDR is that Joel Berry the Babylon Bee guy took a swipe at philosopher Nick Land because Tucker Carlson interviewed an unknown tulpa like white conspiracy theorist who butchered (in his own admission) Landian theory.

A gentleman named Auron MacIntyre caught strays with Berry insinuating some vaguely maybe “not a friend of the Jewish people” haze by associating Land and Auron.

All of this was enormously funny to anyone who actually reads Nick Land. Which includes myself and his current publisher Passage Press.

Nick Land getting a brief mainstream moment because Robert Conrad’s grandson shared a numogram with Tucker prompting Joel Berry to defend Tucker from charges of anti-semitic Lemurian digital teleoplexy in order to smear Auron MacIntyre is exactly how this was always going to go

Now most people have to admit that they have not read Land. You need to have a firm grounding in critical theory and Marxist dialectical materialism to manage the language and a background that forces you through a lot of Kant and Heidegger. As the villain in Die Hard once said “benefits of a classical education.”

Yes I did the homework.

Land is obtuse and most enjoyable to the schizophrenic extremely online types due to his association with the CCRU or Cybernetic Culture Research Unit.

Before you go off the deep end, and take his accelerationist theory in any particular direction, he himself is involved with transhumanism only insofar as a network is a fundamentally alien thing compared to the human mind. As such we are in a transhumanism era arguably since the days of Adam Smith.

This body of theory escaping containment amongst academics had the pleasant side effect of getting the fundamentally alien artifact of old Kabbalah mathematics out front to distract the folks who skipped doing the homework. No jokes from the peanut gallery please.

Excitingly the rest of us were treated to a two and a half hour debate between Nick Land and Alexander Dugin hosted by Auron MacIntyre that has such tidbits as the Anglo-Protestant Whigs being a unique people who by encountering capitalism and the invisible hand at a crucial historical juncture obtained a paleo-liberal Christianity.

While some of us (say myself and Lomez and Land) had a grand old time being absolute terrors on the timeline, the whole affair made it especially apparent how tense it is when the new right’s less informed sects clash with the renegade futurisms crowd. And as I’ve been discovering painful all year, it mostly ends in misunderstanding.

It has been a bit bumpy as let’s just say Patrick Deneen and I make for strange bedfellows but there are clout chasers with much less intellectual firepower who do far worse and they are active, preening, and willfully ignorant.

And yes it’s always a tad embarrassing when the Bannonites go on an Ulster Scot terror campaign against fellow Christians who have chosen to pursue work in technology. Insisting on a new Satanic panic by way of Land is a solution barely wrapped in a Machiavellian hidden truths play.

The sex rationalist doomers at Berkeley do themselves no favors by misunderstanding the deep currents of those who wish to fight against the future (and why) when they get involved. I’d be a better ally to Bannon than these useful idiots and I doubt Land wants to be dragged in to any of this either. It’s messy as all power plays can be.

Elizer Yudkowsky on Steve Bannon’s War Room

I rather think it makes everyone involved look a bit silly when we get tripped up on Lovecraftian horror. Yes I love Charles Stross too but if you believe in chaos magick don’t go around provoking magicians.

It’s unclear to me whether “the runes and sigils on microchips are harnessing demons” crowd is any less embarrassing to the public than we should sacrifice ourselves to the pagan old gods if we are to remain truly human advocates.

The Neo-Jungle of the open network is an implacable force with inscrutable intentions.

I’ll admit that having spent time with the Dark Aeons crowd myself and I rather prefer them to the Luddite machinic “end of the Anthropocene” peek oil Abbey types who are a tad too Malthusian for my taste. They seem like they actually would prefer Gaia exist without humans.

A post human world with new intelligence types is likely to contain a lot more humans than a fallen world where we’ve all died off.

The future arrives independent of our opinions and rushing in only expedites pretenders to the throne. To think otherwise is to usurp God’s power. Peter Thiel’s anti-Christ lectures are not reaching all the ears necessary.

And to save you some trouble; if you had done the reading, you’d know numograns were dropped in by Land as an example of somewhat alien notation practice as alien intelligences from markets to networks to numerical systems were all part of his body of theory.

Once set theory and decimal notation became standard practice numograms were abandoned. But Kabbalah still serves as a hilarious attention sink for celebrities, numerology fans and occasionally the anti-semetic. And this has been a Nick Land acknowledgment.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1740 and Jungian Archetypal Stories

I woke up resolved to apply fresh energy to the new beginning that has forced me into a cycle of grief as I memorialized my father and worked through his death. It’s been a strange and very sad month.

Jungian archetypal stories such as the symbolically significant “kill your father” narrative are templates and fundamental patterns that appear in dreams, literature and myth.

These stories come from the 12 archetypes of Carl Jung and are meant to show fundamental drives and lessons that repeat across human nature. This chart Perplexity found me illustrates them nicely.

My generation’s parents have been alive, in charge, and looming large well beyond what many expected in traditional generational studies.

The fourth turning has nevertheless begun and scramble to secure position, authority and resources pits the remaining elders against their children.

Clearly this is not optimal and we should find our own Jungian stories to free us to reach our own future without the literal end of our fathers. But if one has to suffer this loss then I’ll make the best of it.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1739 and Inflammatory Grief

I am giving myself till the end of the day to feel the anger, pain and frustration that has come to define the grieving process I am in. I lost my father quite recently and it has been an awful experience.

After the memorial ends at 5pm today I intend to let go of what I can even though I know I don’t have full control over it. I had little to do with it at all.

From the moment I learned of his passing I knew it would be a challenge due to the complicated family circumstance.

I’d been preparing for this transition for some years, both for health reasons and because I know that not being next of kin means I have little say in the matter. My time with my father was from a different era of his life and I am grateful for what it gave me. I love my father and always will.

I won’t lie about how much this experience has hurt. I was able to handle a few emotional body blows as I know my father and I have forgiven him a thousand times over for any pain and trauma as it got me here.

That my father struggled to forgive himself seemed a given to me and I intended to extend whatever grace was necessary to those who carried him through his final years.

Everyone experiences grief differently and strange flavors of hostility have indeed surprised me. Sending a living woman’s private erotica kept by her former husband to her daughter is a special kind of fucked up.

In grief, whatever one has to do to the villains you have built in your head is alright by me. It hurt but I don’t think I am hurting as much as someone who would do this. I am doing what I can to not become inflamed by it. These choices are what was deemed necessary.

I do however think we are unprepared for the many private painful emotional moments that will come with the fourth turning as baby boomers pass and their children across modern families grapple with what was broken and its costs.

I consider myself to be incredibly lucky in this regard as I knew it was coming. I am less sure we are prepared as a civilization for the pain that will arrive as more change and death arrives.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1738 and On The Far Side

It’s been a weird week. I’ve kept a slight distance to the logistic of it for sanity, but my father’s memorial is being held tomorrow. He passed over the last long weekend of summer. I found out by voice mail.

It is a complex family dynamic and I am not (insofar as I can tell) invited to event. I know it sounds odd to be unsure, but given how the information has flowed, who has been prioritized, and the reactions to condolence communication I’ve done my best to keep a respectful distance. My grief isn’t the most important grief.

Neither of my father’s children nor his previous wives will be in attendance. It’s not necessarily our choice, or even our place, to have an opinion as he had a third family who welcomed and loved him and I am grateful for their generosity. He had no further biological children but he had another family.

We’ve spent the last few weeks doing a comical amount of legwork with the help of kinds souls, friends and my mother to acquire the ideal floral arrangement and make sure it arrives alive and healthy.

Two Venus fly traps carefully placed in a cardboard box for travel from Colorado Springs to Boulder

In an age where Miss Manners would find few remaining social mores, a respectful but symbolic floral display seemed the most likely to be acceptable and held the most meaning for me and the father I remembered.

He loved Gary Larson, and in the early nineties convinced him, through a bouquet of carnivorous plants to participate in calendar application for Macintosh. Gary decided the Internet wasn’t for him later but that early desktop computer program and its genesis remains a favored family story. A creative and bizarre tale of making something happen.

The Far Side Computer Calendae

Alas it’s not all charming anecdotes. Yesterday a large box arrived with a return address in Big Fork Montana. That is where my father had retired so we knew it was likely from his estate. Part of our hopes in moving here was to be closer to family.

Inside was a mess of the broken glass, old picture frames and hundreds of photograph of a life that my mother, my half brother and my father lived quite happily for a time.

Hiking, fishing, skiing, my first golf lessons, and horse back riding photos filled out the details of a childhood between spectacular eighties family portraits.

Little evidence of the hard years of poverty in tiny apartments was included. It was entirely the glory years of boom times. They were happy memories.

There were also glamorous soft core pictures of my mother in lingerie or swimwear which my father had apparently taken himself. I was initially quite shocked.

Nigh professional grade photos of my mother posed like a pinup are not exactly what one expects in an estate dump of memories. Especially as she is very much alive and well.

My mother’s has given me permission to discuss the images, though she was a bit shocked to learn they still existed.

She swore she had them destroyed but I’m glad they were not as I enjoyed seeing her beauty and vitality. Everyone deserves to remember the years where they were at their physical peak.

My father was a man of many talents and interests and he loved to learn new skills on the latest gadgets. I just didn’t expect to learn he was that sort of artist.

I hope the flowers and our card will be accepted tomorrow. I’ve been reeling slightly from the photo dump and its unheralded arrival. It felt like one last piece of unkindness when magnanimity would have been simpler.

I don’t know if anyone will understand the story behind the flower, so we have made arrangements for the plant’s well being if they are not. It is an imposition to send a living thing and it was my hope to do as little imposing as possible that might cause distress.

My grief is my own. A whole life was in that box and I have no idea if anyone will remember or recall any of it as anyone who was there isn’t invited. But I remember and I will treasure it. He’s on the far side now and free of petty concerns. I love him and I always will.