Author: Julie

Categories
Culture Internet Culture Startups

Day 1946 and Cultural Appropriation Wars

I wish I hadn’t signed online today. I participated in the basest form of attention grabbing virality as I needed a distraction from Bernie Sanders “America and China Need to Stop Artificial Intelligence” press push colluding with the “foot in mouth” disease of Silicon Valley.

So naturally I got caught up in bizarre intrasexual and intersexual competition schemes. Two absolutely bizarre stories dominated the feeds. The first is Asian women in California and the appeal of the ABG. The second is the alleged fantasies of an Indian banker who wanted us to “believe all men” but like Penthouse letters, it seems too good to be true. An Albanian baddie at JPM wouldn’t be that careless.

No clue what I mean? Let me urge you to stay that way. But I’ll put down some thoughts.

If you are a Subaru driver and Vin Diesel fan, you may dimly remember that they were once rice rockets and not lesbian all terrain vehicles. California has diverse homegrown culture of Asian American women who embrace bad boys, fast cars and their East Bay neighborhoods.

The controversy? The ABG culture is being appropriated by striving Product Mommies who believe their B2B SaaS baes will enable their inner Asian Baddie Gangsta ways. I am not from this culture so I can’t exactly say. I think it’s fine if you want to improve your looks in search of a specific aesthetic. There is even an event you can RSVP to attend.

Now the other horror show I mentioned is about intersexual competition schemes from a different Asian culture. Ink has been spilled on western portrayals of the sexuality of Southeast Asian men, specifically how Anglo culture emasculates them. Well, that’s how the story started out.

It began as a “believe all men” tale of Indian man who was a direct report to a blonde Albanian woman at an investment bank. He alleged being forced into sexual contact with his female superior and it is so salacious my best recommendation is to watch it via anthropomorphic fruit. Well, the internet moves fast.

And as the day went on it turned out that it might be some very lurid erotica written by a rake and the very attractive blonde Albanian banker has in fact had her good name besmirched.

Now why am I associating these two stories? I think that identity in Anglo-American dominant cultures has often flattened the experiences of assimilation into our melting pot. London, New York, the Bay Area all have unique flavors of this blending.

And a cultural niches like East Bay Asian gangster baddies (Los Angeles also has its own variants) being consumed as an identity by other Asian cultures as a way to “be bad and sexy” seems harmless. But it’s also consuming a culture you didn’t create. I understand the annoyance.

The upsetting story coming from banking may be a very different way of embracing and reinforcing sexual narratives for southeast Asian men, but it is still fundamentally a story of belief about sexual identity and how it gets used in the workplace. H

ad it not been so incredibly salacious, we might have considered his side of the story a little bit longer, but it is now a piece of culture that reinforces some of the most negative perceptions of southeast Asian men.

Everyone is free to form their own identities and preferences, but it’s a fascinating day when the two major stories running rampant on social media are examples of constructing westernized, fetishized identities to get ahead.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1945 and Always Adjusting

I am adjusting, yet again, to a new set of daily protocols in my never-ending attempt to improve my health. I am experimenting with peptides but don’t tell anyone. I’ve also got a hormone experiment in its second round.

I am trying to get healthier, but that suggests it is even an achievable goal. It would be wonderful to get back to endless working hours or even just eight hours on my feet.

Every time I make a tweak to my routines and I see a change in my biometrics, it’s becomes eventually cause for concern. There’s no stable equilibrium to be found, and I know that’s part of life, but I’d like a stable equilibrium that’s a little bit better than one day at a time or ideally a couple weeks at a time.

Take my experiment with Bimzelx. Even when I achieve an outcome like getting my CRP rates into the normal bounds, it came at a cost that is simply too high to maintain. I had four separate incisions and surgeries last year from soft tissue infections.

What good is a drug that tamps down my immune system so much that I need to always go under the knife? It was like Goodhart’s Law came to haunt me personally.

I am going off the biologic (I am 12 weeks from my last injection) and already seeing change in the wrong direction. Not enormously bad but my immune system will pop if it’s not locked down.

Yet there’s very little I can do except keep going and hope that the balance will be more manageable, as I don’t know that I could have another year like 2025 again.

I set out trying to reboot my immune system last year, and it certainly seems like it worked. But can I keep the numbers in a place that are low enough to let me live, and ideally live with fewer medications?

I am constantly working against some new tweak or some new problem, and even little gentle experiments like a Pilates reformer workout or 10 minutes on the trampoline can turn into a full-day migraine if I am not immediately able to tamp it down. Thoracic pain will pop up crushing my breathing if I take a nice slow hike in the pastures beyond our house

Categories
Finance

Day 1944 and The Polymarket 1% Same As Any 1%

I am not a gambler. I don’t know how to play poker, or honestly any card game without a tutorial. I find the idea of playing the long odds where I have no advantage to be a bit crazy. Why would you involve yourself with a likely net negative outcome other than as entertainment?

People don’t do math though so I am sure I am overthinking the appeal. I am regularly amused by people who think that finance amounts to little more than legalized gambling

I chalk that attitude up to innumeracy and try to worry more about the challenges of introducing regular people to investing in assets where they can calculate the odds of a positive expected outcomes. People should be allowed to do as they please and I believe that self-interest has had positive outcomes here.

I am not for a nanny state. Quite the opposite. Regular people aren’t allowed to invest in private markets where I do most of my work and the accredited investor rules have significant downsides when companies stay private forever.

Companies used to be acquired or they would go public where anyone could invest in a new company they believed in. Thats how regular people like me would make money. Alas fewer companies make it to the IPO market (or are delaying the process) and have growth less in the public markets. So now I worry more about how anyone builds ownership in anything.

I myself am a boring public market investor. We can all work off the same numbers and animals spirits. Keep it simple with ETFs, some bonds and treasuries and the risky bits are contained to my specialities. It’s almost like I know the work is best done by professionals and computers.

Alas, finance and gambling both require having some grasp of the numbers. And this is getting to be a problem all around. I used to think well it’s not too hard to build a basic portfolio. There are books you can read.

Well, we’ve got a fun substitute for day trading now and it’s definitely more fun than owning some ETFs. Prediction markets have finally taken off. I hope for them to be liquid markets for information and exchange but it’s also fun for gamblers

II don’t know enough about how to place a decent bet though so I don’t use them. I’d rather take risk where I have the edge. And the data seems to bear that strategy out. The people who make money in Polymarket are the top 1 percent who know what they are doing

Martineau recently co-authored a paper that found that since 2022 around 69% of traders on Polymarket lost money, while the top 1% captured three-quarters of the profit

This didn’t strike me as particularly surprising, as presumably the people who lose money in any kind of trading situation are the ones who don’t actually understand the odds that they’re working with and the information that they have.

If you buy a random stock on a hot tip, that’s not really going to get you much further than placing a random bet on polymarket. Of course, the people who are making real money are sophisticated.

Automation seems like exactly what you would want if you knew the parameters of the market and the likelihood of payout, which is incidentally also how every other corner of finance works. So unless you’re the kind of idiot who trades on information they have on special forces actions, say, maybe it’s best to leave some of these things to the professionals.

Categories
Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1943 and Lubing Up My Synapses

I’ve struggled with migraines for the lasts seven years and change. It came along with my autoimmune diagnosis but has lived a separate life from ankylosing spondylitis and psoriatic arthritis.

Typically I get them in my luteal phase of my cycle but as I’ve began to experiment with hormones in pellet form (just tucked away in my fat) I’ve began to struggle with them on a more regular basis. It’s no longer tied to any phase of my hormonal cycle.

I don’t know what I did today to kick one off, but about an hour ago I had to lay down in the dark because I just cannot seem to get any relief from the pressure inside my head.

I have a prescription for something called Imitrex, which helps quite a bit, but I’d really prefer to not have them in the first place.

I am not sure I can get anything else out today, except that this is happening and I can’t fix it, so my apologies there.

Categories
Uncategorized

Day 1942 and Deep Sleep Sunday

Yesterday I was firing off zingers left and right like some kind of Internet Yosemite Sam hollering like cartoon frontier gunslinger.

Hair trigger with a side of facial hair

I am displeased with how silly things have become as I ponder the downsides of things falling apart and the upside of accelerating into the turn. That darn rabbit though right?

So this afternoon with some intentions of productivity on my mind, it only makes sense that I passed out sometime after lunch. I got an hour of deep sleep in the mid afternoon. Which is upsettingly more than I got the entire night before.

Don’t mind the alarmingly high heart rate

My heart rate was racing but my body did not care. I’d been exposed to too much autonomic stress the past couple of days and it was just done with letting that happen.

They say Sunday is a day of rest but that is because we are meant to use our response to consider the things that matter most in life. Family, faith and in some cases football. But I spent it passed out in a dark room without a thought in my mind. I hope it helped.

Categories
Media Politics Startups

Day 1941 and Uneven Off The Bars

It’s been such a crazy week. I don’t “feel the AGI” only because I am mired in the give and take of living in America where we still have businesses to run and a lot of regular people committed to actual civics. Progress is fast but implementation is slow.

And then above our daily lives, we are actively in the middle of a kinetic war that our population is only dimly watching.

The information environment being irradiated by foreign propoganda. I am astonished to read regular blatant campaigns that no one questions. I get ads for Chinese phone companies on Twitter. Phones that are not legal to sale in America.

It doesn’t even need to be about any of the active campaigns in the news that a New York Times reader would pay attention to. Below the fold, regional political issues go uncovered. The impolite “nobody reads the Africa pages” is an indelicate joke for readers of international newspapers. Americans often don’t even get them delivered with their printings.

As an example. What does an American understand about Mali anyway? I’ve got like a half dozen friends who care about French colonialism (and the sins of Nicholas Sarkozy) so it’s a niche Francophone thing. The stuff you maybe picked up from those who lived abroad.

So no real tangible value there that isn’t social, but lots of Americans used to study with French families so you might be dimly exposed. Or in the past we had a class of people who were and had state department of think tank jobs.

You’d be shocked at how much we’ve cut back on education in the liberal arts. Just as America has her very own Sicilian expedition, we stop bothering to teach Thucydides. I’m in my Allen Bloom season but without any book tour.

I have been trying to keep my cool as a week of progress is just so fast in very real world situations. I am relishing the success of Valar Atomics as they continue own a fast pace of progress. We are going to need a lot more power to meet needs in America. I want to meet them cleanly so I am honestly wishing for a boom in nuclear beyond personal interest.

All the pissing and moaning about the ethics of artificial intelligence misses the point that we need to supply a lot more power for both consumer and defense needs before disaster could strike. So we might as well suit up. We have to manage what might happen with our physical reality. Like physics bro.

So this week was wild to watch the labs stand off with fast releases. It’s very herky jerky the progress from OpenAI but they had a big week. The enthusiasm around Codex is very real even as no one entirely trusts the even management. Still it was fun to have two new models from OpenAI in a week. It’s funny how running a big startup is still largely product management. And they struggle with it.

Which sounds cute I realize. That I am charmed by progress in energy and algorithms while we test being under a kind of network attack with a very naive and easily swayed online population.

I like to think Americans are independent but we are not doing as much as we could to enable good governance. Americans have a say and plenty understand “right to compute” just as they did the “right to repair” but some in government are actual hard power types. Did no one do any of the reading? I thought everyone was all about the Powerbroker for like a decade.

But we seem to have some real second order effect issues being missed entirely by the labs. Like maybe they are bad at politics? I know it’s a cheap shot but I spend so much of my private time as a citizen doing mop up after companies whose management is under stress.

And being transactional with people isn’t very effective for revealed preferences. You can’t buy people and Americans don’t like the implication it sends about being treated like you can.

Categories
Community Preparedness

Day 1940 and Spring Runoff Season

I joked to my husband that he better get back before nightfall. He had been in the capital Helena for our work on the digital innovation task force. Sunset was at 8:20 or so. The days are getting longer.

The day’s work went at a good clip as the weather coming in was on all minds. We were in for another large late spring snowstorm.

In our corner of the valley we got maybe a couple of wet inches but even up the canyons it was more than a foot.

It kept snowing all night through early morning. It was also quite cold. We went from lashing dry wind and the first fire of the season to snow in no time. Our AQI was poor from the fire south down range of the valley. Hopefully this helped.

It was snowing when I woke but by the time I showered and finished a cleaning round, it was already shockingly bright. Bright blue clear skies and full sun acted like a solar snowblower.

The clouds cleared so quickly and the reflection of the high altitude sun glinting off the white melting snow had me applying sunscreen twice.

We had warm days recently so the spring melt of April is already rising. Adding to snow today was looking at a picture of the challenges of our summer ahead.

Our snow pack is low, We had a rush of snow after warming which will push growth. But can it sustain itself the dryness? The fear is dried out forests and grasses like tinder by August. I hope by being away we can stay a step ahead. The patterns of the Rockies are becoming familiar to all of us.

Categories
Politics

Day 1939 and Everybody’s Free To Be Civically Engaged

To paraphrase Baz Luhrman “If I could offer you only one tip for the future, being civically engaged would be it”

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it
A long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists
Whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable
Than my own meandering experience, I will dispense this advice now

Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)

Ironically there is some controversy on types of sunscreen and its downstream impacts, but my own skin shows that Baz did well by millennial audience by recommending sunscreen. I look good and have no risk factors for skin cancer.

Now I have no scientists with long term evidence to back my claims, but if you want the long term benefits of civilization being civically engaged is well supported by our historical record.

Both my husband and I volunteer time to local civic bodies and you can too. We are both appointed members of the Montana Blockchain and Digital Innovation Task Force.

What is this fancy task force you might ask? Well it was created by our state Senate Bill 330 in 2025. Governor Gianforte charged the task force with studying digital asset regulation and economic development. You too can find opportunities like this at every level of government.

Our task force is co-chaired by Senator Gayle Lammers and Representative Curtis Schomer. It includes state officials, legislators, and industry experts. You can show up and comment if you like. Isn’t participatory democracy fantastic? No seriously go visit the website and join us for the next meeting if you like

Alex drove to Helena today for this month’s session while I Zoomed in. Act local and consider the national is my edit on the old bumper sticker. And really doesn’t this look like fun?

Alex Miller and Montana Senator Daniel Zolnikov

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1938 and ChatGPT 2.0 Image’s Mood Board Mania

Every time a new AI image generation model comes out, there is a wave of people creating new content riffs inspired by their friends testing out the newest capabilities.

Yesterday OpenAI released ChatGPT Images 2.0 which is tool powered by the gpt-image-2 model designed as a “visual thought partner.

It is pretty fun to play with if you have even the slightest design or visual vocabulary to work with. Or even just a couple cool selfies.

No need to focus on regulatory capture politicking, compute shortages, geopolitical drama or shipping choke points when you can create cute social media content right? Screw a grey zone informational wars (or even a hot kinetic one) girls just want to be remade as a fairy princess science or as Studio Ghibli character.

So what’s the next trend? My feed produced a wave of mood boards with color theory, swatching, fabric pins, makeup stories, hairstyles, other mood board elements that combines everything from descriptive prose to capsule wardrobes. And all this from a a couple of basic uploaded photos and some simple prompts.

I choose the below images and said “do a color analysis of the woman in this picture including best colors, makeup choices, hair choices, style options and create a mood board with outfit inspiration, prints that work, accessories and other details”

From there it spat out a long analysis which I will post below. I then asked that analysis to be mocked up in a mood board based on the look and feel of the images with the descriptions from the analysis. And I’m not going to lie it’s pretty good and clearly ChatGPT can smell the Ann Taylor on me. I mean, umm, it can tell I spent time working for some of best known American heritage retailers.

Now it gets weirder the more you try to edit it. The slow warping of my face from my own to I’m going to say Sheryl Sandberg is a little unsettling. But I do wear a lot of silks and prefer greens and browns though I am often a little black dress defaulter.

Now I just went through an enormous exercise in which I tried to find a television and camera ready foundation where other models were sure I was a soft autumn but a soft summer isn’t all that far off.

And I appreciate the buttering up OpenAI does with their quiet luxury spiel. I’m more of an Italic luxury buyer and a Quince if I’m feeling like a gamble. But somewhere back before all this inflation I for sure was the kind of girl who wore chunky antique vermeil accessories and never turned down a nice olive green.

This is a great set of photos for analysis—different lighting, styling, and contrast levels make it much easier to see your natural coloring clearly.

🎨 Overall Color Season: Soft Summer (leaning Neutral-Cool)

You sit in that refined, muted, slightly cool palette with:

  • Low-to-medium contrast (your features blend rather than sharply contrast)
  • Soft, diffused coloring (nothing overly bright or high-chroma)
  • Neutral-cool undertone (pink in the skin, but not icy)

You can borrow slightly from Soft Autumn (especially olive/green tones), but your best looks are cooler and more muted.

🌈 Best Colors for You

✅ Core Palette (your power zone)

  • Dusty rose, muted mauve
  • Soft plum, blackberry
  • Blue-gray, slate, steel blue
  • Sage, eucalyptus, muted olive
  • Taupe, mushroom, cool beige
  • Soft navy (not inky or harsh)

⚠️ Approach Carefully

  • True black (can feel a bit heavy—your blazer photo shows this slightly)
  • Bright white (too stark—soft ivory is better)
  • Bright jewel tones (too high contrast)

🚫 Avoid

  • Neon anything
  • Super warm oranges/yellows
  • High-contrast combos (black + white, etc.)

💄 Makeup Direction

You look significantly more harmonious in the softer, diffused look (photo 1 and 3 vs the sharper blazer look).

Skin

  • Light to medium coverage with a natural or satin finish
  • Avoid overly matte—your skin looks best with a bit of life

Blush

  • Rose
  • Soft berry
  • Muted pink (what you’re wearing in photo 1 = excellent)

Lips (this is your strongest feature zone)

  • Rose gloss (photo 1 = perfect)
  • Mauve nude
  • Sheer berry stains
  • Avoid: orange-red or overly brown lipsticks

Eyes

  • Taupe, mushroom, soft plum
  • Cool brown instead of warm bronze
  • Soft liner (charcoal > black)
  • Mascara: brown-black ideal

💇‍♀️ Hair Analysis

Your natural coloring works beautifully—this is key.

Best Hair Direction

  • Neutral to cool brown
  • Slight ash or soft cocoa tones
  • Subtle dimension (very blended, not high contrast)

Avoid

  • Golden highlights (too warm)
  • Very dark/black dye (overpowers you)
  • High-contrast balayage

Styling Note

You shine with:

  • Soft movement
  • Natural texture
  • Slightly undone polish

👓 Glasses (important win here)

The black frames:

  • Add structure (good)
  • But slightly overpower your softness

Try:

  • Soft charcoal
  • Translucent gray
  • Muted tortoiseshell (cool-toned)

👗 Style Essence + Mood

You read as:

Soft Minimalist + Intellectual Romantic

(very understated, very intentional, very modern)

Think:

  • Quiet luxury
  • Slightly academic
  • Soft structure, not rigid tailoring

🧥 Outfit Direction

Silhouettes

  • Fluid tailoring
  • Draped fabrics
  • Soft blazers (less sharp shoulders)
  • Relaxed but intentional lines

Fabrics

  • Silk
  • Fine knits
  • Matte satin
  • Soft wool
  • Avoid stiff, shiny synthetics

🧵 Best Neutrals (your wardrobe backbone)

  • Mushroom
  • Cool taupe
  • Soft navy
  • Dusty olive
  • Muted charcoal (instead of black)

🌿 Prints That Work

Because your coloring is soft, your prints should be too:

✅ Ideal

  • Blurred florals
  • Watercolor patterns
  • тонal (low contrast) stripes
  • Soft geometrics

🚫 Avoid

  • High-contrast graphic prints
  • Sharp black/white patterns
  • Loud, busy designs

📌 What Your Photos Show (Specific Feedback)

Photo 1 (window light, glasses)

Best overall look

  • Soft pink lip = perfect
  • Brown shirt = harmonious
  • Natural light = confirms your muted palette

Photo 2 (black blazer)

  • Black is wearing you slightly
  • More contrast than your features naturally support
  • Makeup slightly sharper → less aligned with your softness

Photo 3 (relaxed, green tone)

  • Muted green = excellent
  • Skin looks balanced and even
  • This palette direction is very “you”

🧭 Style Keywords (use these when shopping)

  • Muted
  • Soft
  • Washed
  • Dusty
  • Neutral-cool
  • Blended
  • Understated
Categories
Media Startups

Day 1937 and The Great Rektening

Anytime you see dumb headlines and bizarre deal points show up on Bloomberg it’s worth doing a head tilt. The time for consolidation and winners in the first wave of artificial intelligence automation is here and surprise we replaced ourselves.

The first industry being automated is the creative destruction business that is big technology. Don’t worry we destroyed our own jobs first?! First up Google doesn’t having a coding product.

Catching up with various consumer offerings hasn’t mattered as AI coding is the stuff of money and even their own staffers might prefer Claude. Or refuse to use AI at all? That that sounds like the pampered Googlers we all know and sort of dislike.

Second up is the weirdest “deal” I’ve ever seen between Cursor and SpaceX I’ll share with a gift link link as I’ve never seen anything quite like this.

SpaceX said it has an agreement to either acquire AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion later this year or pay $10 billion for its work together, as it works to catch up to rivals in AI coding

You know shit is rough out there when the billionaire with the space monopoly and the compute is offering up something this bizarre to the coding startup that was about to raise 2 billion to catch up to Anthropic but is now maybe going to buy extra time on Elon Musk’s dime. I’m sure stuff is fine at OpenAI right?

I honestly don’t know what the heck is going on except that it’s a good time to consolidate if you don’t have compute (and previous few have enough as hysteria builds in the dare center and power works) and if you have investments in energy you literally can’t go fast enough. It’s feeling a little rekt vibes out there. And I ain’t even ready to address the end of the cease fire.