Categories
Emotional Work

Day 992 and What We Can’t Know

Most of my life I’ve been been awash in assurances. Maybe this wasn’t so bad when I was a child. Approaching life with confidence in the world breeds positivity.

We’ve come to expect certitude. Our institutions and elders deliver most of their hard-earned knowledge with certainty.

Nuance and shades of grey feel dangerous these days. Too much room for interpretation leaves room for confusion. After all, if it’s just a small percentage on the edges, why give people cause to worry?

Except we all find ourselves in the small percentage at some point. As normal as we may be in some areas, or even most, you will probably find yourself being on the edge.

You will want assurances. And as it turns out we are not yet good enough at math to know many things. You can get close to the limit. Infinitely so. But we can never get there. Just try calculating out Pi if you are skeptical of my math.

Categories
Aesthetics Preparedness

Day 991 and Caring for What Is Yours

I’ve got some travel coming up that I’m excited about. I’ll be headed to Europe and more specifically the Baltics. I’ve got plans for both Tallinn and Helsinki. If you are based there and want to hang out drop me a line and let’s get together.

It’s funny how longer trips act as a focus on what’s really crucial to get done. The care that goes into making sure your life (and the items in it) functional is constant.

I often put off errands and services with a “maybe next week” mentality. One week becomes one month and then suddenly I haven’t had my haircut since May and it’s October. So I’m packing a bunch of “to do” appointments to make care the care and maintenance of myself, my body and my belongings.

Even as I place orders for vitamins and find myself reorganizing the toiletries cabinet, I am reminded that the list of care and maintenance never gets any shorter.

There is always a dentist appointment or a salon visit. I’ve got a pile of clothes that need mending and tailoring that hasn’t been addressed since before the pandemic. Yes, I’m one of those types that thinks a tailor and a cobbler are crucial services for civilized living. I like to take care of what I own. That includes everything from my body to my boots.

Categories
Chronicle

Day 990 and Rounding The Turn

You see the marker up in the title that says “Day 990?” Yeah, it means I’m getting close to a thousand straight days of writing.

It’s not a thousand posts interspersed over years or weeks or decades. Though that would still be impressive. It’s a thousand days in a row of writing. No days off. No vacations. No missed days. Every single day I write something and post it on here publicly.

I got started with this experiment in the middle of the pandemic on January 1st 2021. A lot has happened in the intervening years. And I’ve chronicled so much that happened in my own life. I still have quite a bit of 2023 to go but if you want to see my favorite posts from 2022 and 2021.

Because I approach this as a habit, I am intending to make to my thousandth post but I can’t say for sure even with ten days left that I’ll make it. A lot can happen in ten days so it’s entirely possible I won’t. Though the odds have never been better.

I do intend to continue the habit of writing every single day past day 1000th. It would be weird to stop in the middle of the year and I like the symmetry of an entire year of writing as much as I aspire to write Day 1000 in a title.

At this point changing how I write would be an adjustment. I often wonder if I could manage being more polished or more researched or more focused. But I suspect that those types of documents come on their own timelines and I’d simply write more to accommodate them. I wouldn’t necessarily want to lose this daily journaling habit. Something about keeping it simple and consistent appeals to me. So I’ll round the turn and see if I make it to the finish line. And then I’ll see if I keep going.

Categories
Community Internet Culture

Day 989 and Autopoietic Ergodicity

In one of my group chats, I hang out with a bunch of rationalist machine learning engineers who are happily climbing the rungs of accelerating life.

I really love the energy of the community as it’s centered tangibly around making things. It’s a little less talk and a lot more action. It’s got a bit of a feeling of Stack Overflow’s early helpfulness but without the Hacker News nerd sniping culture. It’s like the best of a small Reddit thread but for dudes who want to make shit with artificial intelligence.

Now, of course, every community finds itself with disruptive members and turf fights over social mores. Virtual spaces are notorious for clout chasing and personal dramas. Veterans of green text wars are familiar with Geeks, Mops and Sociopaths in Subculture Evolution.

And so it seems fitting that last night, in a much bigger very public egregore that is e/acc’s online community, we got to witness an immune reaction to someone trying to apply non-consensus standards.

I spent an hour watching it play out last night and then went back to reading before bedtime. I’ve got some personal investment in the space and it’s people, so of course that’s what I’m doing on a Friday Night.

But as I got up the next day and saw everyone going back to work, a insightful lowbie named bmorphism (slang for smaller anon accounts on Twitter within subcultures) introduced me to a term I’d never heard before. Autopoietic Ergodicity. Or how do multi-actor dynamic systems self regulate?

He introduced me Autopoietic Ergodicity via a link on PerplexityAI which seemed appropriate. And it got me thinking about how we as individuals interact on a much wider system and how it interacts with us.

The term combines two ideas by positing that complex adaptive systems (like living organisms or ecosystems) exhibit self-regulating behavior that enables them to maintain persistent patterns while also experiencing change from external influences. These systems are capable of minimizing changes caused by random factors, ensuring their essential dynamics remain stable without needing to undergo a complete reset or cycle back to the initial state. It’s like having a dampening mechanism that continually adjusts for fluctuations, allowing system resilience and long-term persistence in an ever-changing environment.

It’s my suspicion that something special is happening across portions of the fracturing social web as most of our platforms go back under more centralized control. The system is fighting back.

A meme using a Dune visual that originally has the elder Etreides saying to Paul “we need to cultivate desert power” with a substitution “autist power”

The grey tribes that have populated Silicon Valley have an opinion about the future. And it’s a positive one. We’ve got to find ways to be resilient in the face of memetic interference on our systems. There will be high energy distractions. We’ve got to be reminded that it’s a competition for efficient use of energy and we shouldn’t let it be drained. We’ve got to focus on making things that speak for themselves.

Categories
Reading

Day 988 and Independent People

I prefer literature to non-fiction. My reading time is spent with stories. It so happens I’ve been immersed in a story about an Icelandic homesteader by Halldor Laxness.

Originally published in 1934 and out of print for decades, this book by the Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic author is a huge, skaldic treat filled with satire, humor, pathos, cold weather and sheep. Gudbjartur Jonsson becomes Bjartur of Summerhouses when, after 18 years of service to the Bailiff of Myri, he is able to buy his own croft.

Publisher’s Weekly.

It was described to me as social realism as it follows the harsh reality agrarian Iceland, debt bondage, and the things that are lost in the quest to be free of obligation to anyone. Set across multiple vignettes of Iceland’s history it trace’s the family’s arc from servitude to owners of a sheep farm during World War 1.

Halldor Laxness’s Independent People

It’s a sad story. The protagonist experiences loss after loss in pursuit of his independence. The dream of being indebted to no man comes up against the hypocritical fantasies of the upper classes and their own views of what constitutes a free life.

I am by no means living the kind of homesteading life of the rural agrarian Icelandic people. But the tragic losses that come as part of seeking to be less reliant on systems that enrich others (the church and local landed gentry feature) resonates. It is not easy to be independent people.

The cycles of nature and life come as they wish with little thought to one’s philosophies. Independence and dependence are just ideas that must face reality. I thought of Bjartur as we buried the dead laying hen in the back pasture.

Categories
Homesteading Medical

Day 987 and Eggs

One of our hens died today. My husband took on eight chickens from one of our friends a month ago It was an exciting moment. He really wanted chickens and it felt like great luck.

The family was moving and so Alex stepped in. If it were just me alone I probably wouldn’t have any animals as I don’t necessarily always have the physical capacity to do daily chores. I realize that’s a funny statement for someone who lives on a homestead in Montana but you get used to your limits and work around them.

But my husband lives for doing shit. I call him a “man of action” as he’s happiest when working on something. Chores and animals and homestead work are a hobby for him and I’m deeply grateful we could bring that way of living into our lives. I am envious that he has the capacity as there are few joys as deep as improving the world around you. I wish I could do what he does.

So it’s sheer bad luck I find myself on my own when one of the hens died. Alex was literally gone for a day and one of his birds dies on me. I feel responsible for the death even though I know I am not.

Death happens. Chickens are strange finicky animals and do in fact sometimes just up and die. I’m capable enough with death. I did plenty of farm work as a kid. But I’m not the one who does the bulk of the hard physical work and never will be. I contribute other things.

I simply wasn’t expecting that with just one day on my own being responsible for the hens that something bad would happen. But there I was finding myself responsible for dealing with the physical reality of a dead bird on my own.

I happened to have a doctors appointment in town this morning so I didn’t check on the chickens when I woke up. And that’s what I feel worst about. That I didn’t even notice.

I got in the car, went to get my own eggs checked (a follicular ultrasound if you are curious) and came back to find an entirely different egg problem on my hands.

I went to collect the morning’s eggs and saw a red hen laying underneath the raised coop. I briefly panicked wondering what the fuck was I supposed to do. She was clearly dead and I’d missed it. I’d just left for town without even checking on the hens.

I panicked and tweeted that I’d had no idea what to do. And then I found the heavy duty trash bags and nitrile gloves and moved the carcass out of the coop. The remaining hens seemed disturbed. The leader of the group in particular was quite vocal and came up to me as I was moving the body.

They didn’t seem to mind the body in the coop but began loudly clucking at me as I pulled her out. Did you know that chicken rigor mortis sets in about three to four hours after death? I do now. The body was in rigor when I found her so she had clearly died overnight.

I feel horribly guilt that I didn’t check the hens before I left for the doctor. But what would I have done? Judging by the rigor she was dead before I woke up.

I’m not sure I could have done the clean up quick enough to make my appointment. But the idea that the hens were just poking about next to their dead compatriot for any additional time while I went about my business of living seems horrifying. I guess that’s my own human bias setting in as they didn’t seem particularly disturbed by the body only by me removing it. I bagged it and put it in a bear proof trash can. I pulled up poultry disposal procedures and asked my internet friends what the duck to do next.

Some of our neighbors came over after their workday to help me dig a hole in the back pasture to bury the body. Digging a hole 3 feet down to keep the predators from sniffing it out is the recommended procedure.

I wasn’t up to the task of digging a grave on my own. Mostly because I’m not good enough with the tractor to get the post hole digger mounted. Thankfully I had help.

The remaining hens had laid three more eggs in the intervening hours. I had also learned in those hours that my ovaries were producing more than ample follicles. It would seem that, like our hens, I produce eggs in adverse conditions too. The circle of life in just one day.

Categories
Culture Preparedness

Day 986 and Risky Business

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to how we see risk the past few years. What is an acceptable risk? What are the boundaries of risk perception and how much variability is there between two people? How much of those tolerances are innate versus cultural? Can you consent to risks you don’t understand?

Philosophers have been working on these questions for a while and we don’t seem to have gotten much further on the problem than some of us dislike change and some of us are more open to change. Figuring out any grand causal theories of openness doesn’t seem any more legible with regression analysis.

We have little coordination of acceptable risks at the individual, local, national, planetary and species level, just as we most need to understand if we can all collectively tolerate significant social, economic and political risks associated with new technologies.

We just don’t seem to have consensus on risk much beyond “don’t get someone killed.” Yelling “slow down” barely works with toddlers, so I don’t see how anyone considers it a viable tactic for coping with, let’s just say, artificial intelligence.

I don’t consider myself to be someone who takes a lot of unnecessary risks. I like to do my homework. While I was never a Boy Scout, I do subscribe to their motto. “Be Prepared!” But if you asked my friends and family they’d probably say I am a risk taker. Who is right? It’s clear that preparation and planning mitigate known risks. Beyond that it’s not up to me. It’s probably not up to you either.

Categories
Medical

Day 985 and Know So Little

Every time I have have cause to interact with any medical speciality I find myself blown away by just how little we know.

I’ve been going back to doctors to understand what my options are for living with an autoimmune condition and having children. And the truth is we just don’t know much.

I made a life altering decision several years ago by letting a medical decision be framed to me like a consumer product. We opted to freeze eggs and embryos and it turned our entire lives inside out. It triggered an autoimmune response in me that I’ll live with forever.

Somehow in the intervening half decade years we’ve learned precious little about women’s health and fertility. And we are advocating for somehow knowing even less.

Because that’s what we’ve done by letting the government into our health decisions. Don’t kid yourself into thinking when we involve government and bureaucrats we somehow improve our knowledge and safety. At it’s most friendly, when the government shows up it’s about ass covering. At it’s most hostile it’s about control.

We argue about ethics, safety and life as if we even have a shared ideal of any of those concepts. Whose life? My life? My unknown children? I’m not convinced we ever cared about women’s health as an independent variable. We treat fertility as a sideshow and hormones as some variable over which we pretend to have control. And yet every time I try to assess my own risks I find out that we known just about nothing. There are no good answers. And it’s all poorly understood risks.

Categories
Emotional Work Politics

Day 984 and Distrust

I had a bad migraine over the weekend that simply took up all the space in my mind and body. I woke up with a break in the pain and a deep urge to throw myself into something that felt like momentum.

I found myself awash in sadness. I couldn’t stop myself from crying. It was as if my entire body felt despair. I’ve come to accept the value in embracing emotions as they come. “The only way out is through.”

I trust that my nervous system knows as much as my cognitive mind. I go so far as to say it knows more but that sounds a little woo to folks. And so I listened to my sadness. I cried. I rambled at the many problems large and small facing my corner of the universe.

The distrust I have for our elders who twenty two years ago used today as a catalyst for sending us down an inexorable path of death and fraud. I cried over petty inconveniences like the broken visa system keeping people I care about outside of America.

It’s hard to understand how we came to this point across a generation. But easy to see why millennials are unsure if any of our institutions can be trusted. And I wonder what it’s like to have no memory of a time before 9/11.

Categories
Medical

Day 983 and Down For The Count

I have been felled by a migraine today. I’ve been unable to tolerate light, noise or food for a little under twenty four hours. Probably one of the worst migraines I’ve ever had but my suspicion is that it’s tied into a few other issues.

My husband was struggling with some type of infection. It never popped at Covid on tests but given the prevalence of various forms of colds, flus and other illnesses popping up in the back to the arena phase of fall I wouldn’t be surprised if we were both fighting something off.

I am hoping that staying in bed and drinking gallons of water and electrolytes will pay off tomorrow. The intensity of the pain has been unpleasant. Add in nausea and I’m mostly staying still and praying for relief. I’ll catch you all tomorrow.