Author: Julie

Categories
Chronic Disease

Day 880 and Pollen

It seems as if I exposed myself to a bit too much pollen in my wandering yesterday but I’m so itchy I’ve reconsidering whether pain is more or less all-absorbing than itching.

So I am giving myself permission to take it nice and easy on this blog post today. This morning I ordered an enormous number ($150 or so) of creams, unguents and lotions as well as a number of anti-histamines from a German apothecary in the hopes of gaining some relief.

Drug Delivery By Wolt
An assortment of German antihistamines and a few fun free samples as I guess I spent a lot.

I take multiple antihistamine already but I got a fourth (it’s Claritin in the US. A got a corticosteroid cream, something called Zugsable or black cream (it smells like tar) and a Linola Fett cream which appears to be like Weleda skin food without the fragrances. Plus some melatonin as I’m not sleeping so great with this itching. They tossed in some cosmetics as well which I will definitely put to use. And that’s all she wrote today.

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 879 and Out of Home

It’s a holiday in America and Germany today, so this morning I went out to do some semiotic spotting like an elder millennial Cayce Pollard.

Just kidding (not kidding). I went to have breakfast at an outdoor cafe and went for a long walk. All imagery shown in this post was captured in service of a stroll. That stroll had a smoked salmon & horseradish cream on toast in the middle of it. I was walking a trendy mixed use neighborhood that was just on the line between hipster and yuppie.

I felt like I got in as I was wearing entirely unbranded minimalist garments. I was eyeing “out of home” advertising design elements during a stint a digital nomad in a major culture & financial hub. Yes, I enjoy my own main character energy when I’m pretending I’m a Gibsonian heroine.

It was a fine breakfast had the cafe’s outdoor seating not been underneath forest of trees in full pollination mode lining an urban roundabout. I must be Cayce twice over as my allergies weren’t limited to fashion.

The pollen was killing me after two hours. Cayce is the protagonist of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition and makes her living in advertising by having an extreme sensitivity to corporate logos and mascots. My eyes were itchy, red and swollen and my own aesthetic attention felt equally uncomfortable. Everywhere I looked was mass market diffusion “direct to consumer” aesthetics. Including on an Ann Frank day poster.

Out of home advertising for Ann Frank Day

The poster’s design included multiple 2016 style Pantone shades of blue including teal with geometric blocking. It gave the impression it was a cookware brand being advertised on the New York City subway somewhere in the middle of the DTC design boom.

Advertising posters in Frankfurt

Other design elements also brought to mind the DTC rush for me. Flat lay citrus with a reusable shopping bag? A pensive woman on a simple prop like a stair case? I can’t tell if it was Everlane circa 2014 or Bon Appetite from before their woke crisis.

Inexplicably a Linkin Park tribute band
Heavy Psych Stoner Kraut

Thankfully weirdness did eventually prevail over the seamless sameness of flattened consumption messaging. A Linkin Park tribute band and something labeled “Heavy Pysch Stoner Kraut” gave me some faith that weird shit was alive and well. Sanded down Silicon Valley by way Baudrillard consumer aesthetics may be soothing in their sameness.

But I was searching for friction. If only to distract myself from being itchy. Pollen and boutique design agency products make me break out.

Categories
Finance Travel

Day 878 and European HVAC

If I were a betting women, and I am, I’d be placing them on European heating, ventilation, and air conditioning corporations. Yeah, I think HVAC is a growth industry for the continent.

HVAC is use of various technologies to control the temperature, humidity, and purity of the air in an enclosed space. Its goal is to provide thermal comfort and acceptable indoor air quality.

You’d think after the pandemic brought the importance of air quality to everyone’s attention, that decent ventilation would a priority. Add in the increasing frequency of deadly heat waves and you’ve got real tailwinds for HVAC technology being crucial not only for comfort but for life.

So why are European apartments somehow both poorly ventilated and poorly insulated at the same time? Is there even a term for this? Finally I viscerally understand why bad air (mal air) is one of the canonical health problems of the Western Cannon. All those nerdy writers inside were suffering.

I’ll grant 1700 era European cities have more excuses than modern cosmopolitan ones for having stuffy, dusty, stinky, hot and yet somehow also cold and drafty air. They didn’t have electricity so no fans, pumps or air exchanges. But why the fuck haven’t they fixed it yet?

The worst plague of the great indoors is shitty HVAC. We have no excuses for it anymore as it’s an environmental health hazard on its own before we even consider the current energy crisis (don’t even get me started on what counts as being green). Refusing to keep your apartment’s ventilated and insulated is bad for your body and your budget.

So if anyone has suggestions for investing up and down the value chain of improving HVAC systems I think we’ve got a growth industry on our hands. Europe can’t refuse to air condition forever and it sure can’t afford to continue to burn coal and Russian gas to heat drafty apartments either.

Categories
Culture

Day 877 and Punch The Nazi Nerd

I want to rant a little too much today, as it’s a holiday weekend and it’s all sunshine, apfelsaftschorle and pretzels but I need to rant a little bit. For a treat.

Anyone with too much focus on the esoterica of life; the nerds, the dorks, the dweebs and the outcasts, has some baggage. I never felt particularly uncool as a kid because I moved around enough that I didn’t have a lot of past embarrassments to hold me back. Odd when a childhood trauma ends up being protective.

But I’ve met plenty of genius in my time and a lot of them carry deep hurt from how they were treated as kids. The trauma isn’t always healed. And hurt people hurt people.

We used to expect an even trade from our nerds. You’ve got righteous technical skills and understand how those changing tools will affect the culture of the world. You see a future and hack at it because you’ve seen the rules of the game.

We need those rule breakers because they keep us honest. But we’ve got to keep them honest too. Life is a team effort and it takes all kinds of skills to pull off something great. The hacker nerd archetype is just one member of the team.

But if you are playing on easy mode, and the nerds have been on easy mode since we needed whiz kid scientists to fight the Nazis, then you don’t handle rejection too well. Everyone thinks they are owed something on the internet for being barely above a midwit. And they are probably right as we are living Idiocracy out there right now.

But you’ve got to have boundaries. Nowhere is that truer than with someone with a deep hurt. Probably why we have company politics, project managers and deeply angry startup mommies who spend their whole ass lives managing the feelings of man-babies who produced code. It ain’t great for moral.

I don’t know why nerds are such children. They say you stop growing at the age of your first trauma. Maybe. Or maybe if you had someone to clean up the hurt for you as a child you don’t know how to clean up your own messes as an adult. Mommy issues everywhere I enjoyed being a spoiled bitch more when I didn’t realize the enormous cost. Rationalize and reconcile what you can.

I don’t mind the hurt when nerds deliver us energy and weapons and the stars and whole new ways of self organizing. I’ve sided with nerds my whole life. Nerds are my ancestral people. Witches and rocket scientists and trailer trash chemists.

But if a nerd pretends the consequences of living with others doesn’t apply to them because they are so much more special, well you better be skeptical. Nerds can be bullied too. Sometimes you do in fact need to punch a bully. Punching Nazi nerds in particular is rarely a poor choice. The nerd bullies may need it the most. Remember it’s dweebs with delusions of grandeur who commit genocide and raise armies for fascists. Banality of evil and all that. Happy Memorial Day weekend everyone.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 876 and Americana

Americans have a tendency to think of themselves as the cultural norm. The default setting of media and movies and magazines has been the American empire. The world’s taste orbited our empire during nearly all television and cinema. I hear we Americans make our problems everyone else’s problems too.

It’s also a fantasy. Uncle Sam is a marketing gimmick. There is a propaganda machine even if it’s not organized by a sub committee of party loyalists. The vox populi push on our taste and our media industry will show them what is worth mimicking. Marketing works.

So it’s always amusing to see a bit of Americana marketed back to yourself. I saw this street advertisement for what appears to be a sincere sort of western show?

The Bosshoss Electric

I’m consuming an entirely different genre of Americana than someone in Frankfurt. Which I admit I’m not sure I fully understand as I think it’s maybe a sincere musical that has a western sparkly rodeo theme? Again the semiotics on it would require a critical theory degree. Which I guess you could get in the city of Schopenhauer.

Momma don’t let your boys grow up to be cowboys. Rodeo seems like a brutal pastime in a country with no social safety net or functioning medical systems. Maybe that’s why it can be romantic here in Germany. Maybe you’d get medical care if you ever came in contact with a bull.

Speaking of semiotics, I’m rewatching Yellowstone while in Frankfurt. Yes it’s amusing that the yuppie woman reclaiming her lost Western upbringing by moving to Montana is watching a soap opera about land barons outside of Bozeman. Simulacrum. Something that replaces reality with it’s representation. I knew Foucault would come in handy.

Dicke Butz authentic American cuisine
Categories
Travel

Day 875 and Spring Fever

I had a flu this time last year. I was in process of closing on our home in Montana. What a week that was for me. The first piece of real land I ever owned. Better late than never.

This May I think I just have plain old hay fever. Blooming trees on Frankfurt city streets combined with a roadside bedroom has me sniffling and itching. I broke out the prednisone. 5mg at first. Then upped to 10mg the next day. I treat prednisone like most people treat opioids. “In case of emergency” would be preferable.

Maybe I simply get spring fever of some sort and I can romanticize it like some British Regency period piece as interpreted by Shonda Rhimes. Ah she had the rheumatic touch when she bought her ancestral home. But then had the vapors when she came to the Hapsburg Court. The deadly poisons of springs first flower has felled her bloom. Spring fever indeed, my pretties.

I didn’t even use ChatGPT for that. My brain can spit back up sick tropes. Nevertheless I do feel a bit felled by this inflammatory cycle that has required a little more attention than preferred.

Categories
Culture

Day 874 and Steady Hand

All the science fiction I read as a kid has been a great trial run for the current reality. We have synthetic selves, AI chatbots, embedded intelligence, and money run by a consortium of your peers.

That’s not too shabby considering that my favorite utopian science fiction Star Trek depicted San Francisco as a crime ridden dystopia with a vast chasm of financial inequality. Oh wait.

I didn’t expect future shock to be so tiring. I expected a bit more fun and optimism and a little less doom, fascism and reactionaries. But I guess like all humans, we forget that our history is just repetitive series of discovering that power corrupts but human ingenuity prevails at solving the problems we bring in ourselves.

How long that luck holds is now in our hands. I sure hope we don’t fuck it up too much as we fuck around and find out. And if I’m going to survive future shock I need to take care of myself, stay one step ahead and make sure I have a little fun along the way. A steady hand and a calm nervous system is necessary for a chaotic world.

Categories
Biohacking Emotional Work

Day 873 and Commitments

I have two conflicting commitments at the moment. Both are with people who I’d consider intimate relationships with as much access to my inner life as my closest confidants.

I made the decision to show up for both parties last week and this week. And while I don’t regret my decision at all, the choice has had consequences. I am accepting them right now. I’m in bed and in a fun spiral of inflammation. I’m in pain, and even more annoying, I’m fucking itchy as hell. My biometrics are screaming red across every dashboard from Whoop to Welltory.

The irony, of course, is that in being so committed to showing up for others I failed to show up for myself. I didn’t know what I wanted so I did everything I’d obligated myself to do.

I can’t blame it on anyone even though it’s so easy to consider the ways I can rationalize my choices. I’m committed to good and useful things that improve my emotional fluidity and contribute to my personal growth.

Being committed to others means being committed to yourself first. The better I maintain my boundaries, the more I can show up for someone else. Knowing what we want, asking for it clearly, and being accountable for the actions you took is the whole ball game. Everything else is details. And I bet you can manage that.

I am committed to myself as I’ve got to rest and get myself under control or else I’m not being accountable. And I’m not a victim to my circumstances. I chose this.

Categories
Internet Culture Reading Startups

Day 872 and Synthetic Selves

I’ve been writing in public, on and off, for my entire adult life. First it was goofy tween personal made for myself on hosted social media like Livejournal & Geocities.

My younger years were filled with sundry hosted publishers that taught you just enough HTML & JavaScript to be a foot soldier in the ISP and browser war, but never quite encouraged you to gain the more foundational tools to host yourself independent of their network effects. Closed gardens of that era gave you a small plot of digital land to tend in their giant kingdoms. I never felt like I could homestead outside of their cozy walls on my own domain.

Those plots of writing yielded fruit though. And while it feels as if I only saved a small fraction of my writing over the years, I have hundreds of thousands of words.

I do have an archive of my collegiate blog which later turned into one of the first professional fashion blogs and spawned my first startup. I’ve got 872 straight days of writing saved from this daily experiment. And while I mostly auto-delete my Tweets I’ve also downloaded the remaining archives.

Why am I mentioning my written records? Because making a synthetic version of your intellectual self that is trained through your writing is now a possibility. I’d been introduced to Andrew Huberman’s “ask me anything” chatbot that was made through Dexa.AI and I thought I’d like that but for my own writing. So any founder or LP can get a sense of who I am by asking questions at their leisure.

We’ve come so far that it is an almost quotidian project for developers if you can provide enough training data and it looks as if I may have enough. Just by tweeting my interest I was introduced to chatbase.co, ThreeSigma.ai, Authory (great way to consolidate your content) and the possibility of knocking out a langchain on Replit. Aren’t my Twitter friends cool?

A big thank you to 2021 me and 2022 me which wrote so damn much. Click those links for my “best of” round ups. Hopefully I’ll have a synthetic self soon so you will have the option of asking it instead of hyperlink rabbit holing down endless inference threads.

My buddy Sean and I landed on “Phenia” as this synth’s name. He’s tinkering already. My husband Alex is already wondering what the heck is going on. But I see a pattern emerging. Phenia as in apophenia. A synthetic self capable of pattern recognition towards an inward spiral of infinite synthetic selves? Not a bad choice for a name at all. We can figure out a chat bot in a bit.

Categories
Community Politics

Day 871 and Collaboration in the Time of Cultural Cholera

Perhaps its a function of being an American abroad in Germany, but I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the social contract and the expectations we have for free association and collaboration.

Germany’s democratic socialism is abutting against the challenges of global market capitalism and cultural pluralism. And the strain is evident. Frankfurt is expensive and there are many competing populations from refugees to globo-homo cosmopolitans

I think only one in five people I’ve encountered appear to be native born German. It’s almost enough to make me feel like I’m in America. Which is to say I see the in-group and out-group competition clearly.

Different expectations for a civic polity can range wildly depending on the goal. We enable everything from humanity wide medical breakthroughs to individual physical health through incentives both individual and collective. And yes because I’m American I notice shit like who pays for parks and recreation. I also notice soda taxes. Choices are all around us and the incentives make it look like no choice at all.

Humans live at varying degrees of abstraction. Our capacity to go from whole to parts, and parts to whole, depends on education, temperament, intellect, emotional capacity and preferences.

And that diversity of views is what makes it so hard for us to infer what “chunk” of reality our fellow humans see. No wonder we struggle with collaboration as a species. Your fellow man is as sensitive to elite semiotics as they are to casual racism.

Where our new living history takes us is going to depend a lot on how we design incentives for collaboration that provides benefits to participants that are transparent. Otherwise I’d be strapping in for more civilizational struggles.

My aspirations include us finding ways to collaborate across much wider destinies with as much freedom for all can be managed. I’m hoping AI and crypto go hand in hand. High trust and no-trust are our only options at this scale. But like any reformation it threatens the current powers and worldviews.