Tag: Aesthetics

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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
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
Culture Homesteading

Day 856 and Spring Into Action

It’s been a beautiful week in the Gallatin Valley. Every single morning on my daily constitutional walk I notice new growth. Very suddenly we went from of melting & assessing snow damage to bright and sunny spring green.

The more northern latitudes get a shorter growing season (in fact we will get more snow) but the season is one of magnified intensity as our evenings stretch towards 10pm before the light is gone. And so on this first weekend of May we’ve begun taking action on spring. Hobby farmers spring into action.

Alex slicing open a bag of manure in our back pasture in preparation for tree planting
A man, a hole, and a shovel

My husband and I have no idea what we are doing but with the true spirit of fuck around and find out we began anyway. Our running joke is that Alex is a #ManofAction as there is just simply so much more practically to do when you live on land for which you are ultimately responsible. It’s a lot of fun and very grounding.

And as you might guess the most liberating feeling in the world is being held accountable for yourself and your choices. So even knowing full well you are basically that dog typing on a computer subtitled “I’ve got no ideal what I’m doing” you carry on anyway.

I’ve got no idea what I’m doing Golden Retriever Typing

While I did a few laps around the pasture and helped with a bit of the lighter work my role was mostly to capture the fun and excitement of trying something new. We picked two apple, two plum and one cherry from Starks Brothers to add in after a fall planting of a number of apple trees. We’ve got no idea if any of this is going to take. We’ve read some books but that barely counts.

Our cyberpunk John Deer free of computer parts along with a few stages of planting

Meanwhile inside the homestead I’ve been doing some spring cleaning. I’ve been appropriately assigned gender formative roles as I actually enjoy keeping things attractive and beautiful. The closests need turning over from the wool and layering over to tee-shirts, sundresses, and linens. Alex mostly goes from button downs to tee shirts. Jeans are swapped for cargo shorts. Being a man is simpler.

Winter boots need to be put away and flats, sneakers and sandals brought to the front. Alex had more work gear and footwear as he does more of the outdoors work than I do so shoes are more Alex than me.

Heavy winter oil and moisture rich cosmetics will give way to lighter water creams and ceramides. I don’t change retinols but I may add in more C and lactic acid for turnover in the heat. Alex meanwhile gets away with a basic vitamin C moisturizer and SPF.

I alas have not dealt with getting my hair trimmed in sometime but the reminder that it’s time to cut off dead ends is ultimately a spring time ambition. Hopefully you had the good sense to prune in the winter. My husband is lucky enough to simply buzz his head. Happy spring everyone and may your rituals enjoyable to you.

Categories
Community Startups Travel

Day 849 and “Oh I Follow You!”

I’ve been in Austin for Coindesk’s Consensus crypto conference. I’m flying home to Montana today after five intense days of work. But if the on the ground reception is any indication, I nailed this year with my talks and vibes. I might actually be good at my job.

Conferences can be tricky if you are a speaker. You’re obligated to hold attention & entertain while also getting across complicated topics like governance contracts. It takes energy and preparation to do it well.

This year I was a bit less academic than last year as Marc Hochstein and I hosted an interactive town hall which was spicy as hell and my loud carnival barker voice carried. A bit bigger than just a talk and I think it was a hit.

By the end the room was packed with folks passing by and stopped to see what we were discussing. A bunch of smiling energetic faces and a loud lady in a full length dress is a bit eye catching out on a convention floor stage. I got so much positive feedback.

Heck, I was in a bathroom where I overhead an attendee discussing the panel the next day with a gentleman who was also panelist. The attendee raved to the panelist and said “that chick” really held everyone’s attention on topic. A good performance all around.

I called Consensus a “summer camp for adults” as it all your crypto friends get together for it. An expensive paid conference with a lot of talent and speakers makes for excellent serendipity. I felt like I made new connections and even a new friend or two.

It felt easy as in a small community someone like me gets to enjoy the benefits of niche fringe micro-celebrity. I kept hearing over and over “I follow you on Twitter” along with “she’s so funny on Twitter she says the shit you are thinking.” I’ve got to admit it feels good.

And I think it was fun for Alex who spent part of the week hearing folks tell him that while he’s great (and everyone loves his homesteading adventures) but they are really more excited to meet his wife. Dare I say I’m a trophy wife?

It’s super fun when your internet frens and parasocial relationships come together in actual reality. We were all happily saying “oh I follow you” to each other all week. I miss everyone already. But I’m happy to be home in Montana.

Categories
Community Internet Culture Startups

Day 848 and Summer Camp

I’m not a camp kid. I’m told there exists a group of kids whose formative summer experiences are at summer camp and I’ve watched enough American television to have the gist of the genre. It looks fun.

Professional conferences appear to offer a similar experience to adults. You have a yearly event or two that gets together various sets of old colleagues and professional teams that then overlap with social and affinity groups. I’ve been at Consensus which is one of crypto’s many conferences but somehow one of its most inclusive.

It’s a bit of a crossover event where a lot of different factions put aside their differences and ask why the fuck are we here and what the fuck are we even building anyway. And the answer seems to be every kind of kid you’d expect at summer camp. We are building a pretty inclusive place with a lot of weirdos.

You’ve got the academic nuanced protocol dorks, the tradfi to defi chads, the solar punk regenerative commons open source projects, developer tool companies, analytics firms and graph data scientists, privacy and OpSec nerds, and even the baroque online misogynists. And me, who is, I guess, a chaos magic witch or a pre-seed venture investor if you are nasty.

Crypto is for everybody and sometimes we aren’t thrilled by everyone who shows up but we do our best to make sure everyone is included in the effort. Maybe we even help cool down the radicals and maximalists right? Maybe we can reach a consensus?

Everyone who is here this year is down for the fight. There are a millions reasons why skepticism of centralizing authority and panopticon states is good. Mostly it comes down to insisting on finding a trust layer that we can all agree on. Even if you are a racist weirdo online.

And I’d imagine most marginalized identities can understand the basic skepticism how big institutions. I’ve only got a few issues (disability and gender come to mind) and even I see how institutions turn a blind eye to our needs if we don’t stand up. So we’ve got to agree on a common set of civilizational rules. If a state can’t do that then we better build alternatives fast. Trust layers matter.

So I’m glad that I’m in an aligned fight for those basic ideals. We are fighting for a consensus in a pluralistic world. Because that’s one where we can all prosper. And speaking as someone at summer camp for utopians, it feels pretty good to be optimistic. Just give us a decade or two to keep fucking around and finding out. With enough of us competing we will get there.

Categories
Startups

Day 846 and Serendipity

Last night I arrived in Austin for my favorite annual cryptocurrency event called Consensus. If you are participating please consider coming to my interactive town hall on Thursday at 1:30pm where we have an hour of panel & audience discourse on the future of trust & community.

I am excited for this panel as I feel like I’m ready to own my experience as a professional community builder. It’s been a job in the social media era for a bit. But it’s only recently that we’ve realized the ecosystem of builders is tightly knit together by a tapestry of overlapping passions and competencies. It’s lots of different kinds of nerds.

We arrived earlier than expected which enabled us to go to an event with Jon Stokes (I was slightly more excited to see his wife Christina but Jon knows I adore him too). While we had lots of folks discussing heady issues like the network state, it is most joyful for me to discuss the more human aspects of life in a community. Who was looking after the kids and which one of our neighbors is housesitting. Practical daily living things felt like the natural connection of humans beings working together.

From there we went to a dinner with one of our most cherished real ones Ben Huh. The man knows food so I was thrilled to be feeling healthy enough to stay out and enjoy a meal with a table of deeply weird unabashedly themselves people. When we did introductions the question was “what is something you are obsessed with right now?”

The answers were wide ranging. High temperature cooking, textile pattern making, reality dating shows on Netflix (not for the record me but I am also obsessed), showing up as you are, sewing the perfect custom dress shirt, raising goats, riding tractors, reading science fiction mind bender The Three Body Problem, and mastering nervous system regulation (this one is me).

I felt like everyone I saw that night was one of my fellow travelers. The serendipity of overlapping passions and curiosity showed me so many ways I connect with diverse humans. I encountered politics as disparate as reactionary fascist and shitlib standard as everyone comes to grip with a future that feels as yet unwritten. There is a lot of serendipity on the frontier. It’s nice to be reminded that the future is built together.

Categories
Startups

Day 840 and Do You Believe in Magic?

The glory of writing every single day is you start to build m records of your own life. You notice how much your own personal cultural history is syncretic. I’ll always be a fan of blogging because it’s got chronology at its heart. Sometimes it’s good to see how we evolved over time.

Having a written record is hard and often dangerous. You own a lot of work in progress that doesn’t necessarily reflect where you landed. And internet opposition research is fantastic at catching you in a former evolution. We call it getting cancelled. But if you get it right you have the receipts.

But if you are an honest broker of your bets you will admit when you get better and more complete information. The real magic of startups is that markets are often excellent teachers of how we are just dead wrong. And if we listen to what we are told we can adjust. And as the old saying goes the market can be irrational longer than you can be solvent. The reverse is true too.

Consensus reality is a bit magical. I called our fund chaotic because the process of getting people to align is magical but it’s chaotic as fuck. It’s studied but experimental. It relies on rules and the temerity to break them. It’s chaos magic. I wanted people to see a bit of the woo woo in our fund name every day. Technology and magic are just separated by layers of abstraction. Go read Charles Stross.

So I was overcome with delight when I saw Geoff Lewis discuss how startups are magical. An all time delightful addition to the genre of how does venture capital and startup growth even work? Fred Wilson blogged so Geoff Lewis could vlog. And he did it with verve while discussing Dungeons and Dragons stats. Also he’s team maxed charisma like me so I am inclined to like him.

The fun part is that he and I don’t really overlap except on Twitter. We’ve never discussed any of this. But our syncretic workflows had overlapped. It felt like a small ecosystem knitting moment. An alignment of metaphors and aesthetics. It made me feel damned optimistic and yes I do believe in magic. And I hope you do too.

Categories
Community Homesteading

Day 839 and Chatty

I occasionally have the ambition to be less of chatty Cathy. I almost cannot help myself in Montana. I keep meeting folks who are into the same stuff as me and then I’ll just end up talking for an hour.

Introverted Julie somehow always finds the homesteader, science fiction, alternative economy, crypto libertarian aesthetic studies semiotics pirate at the party. Sometimes it’s even the same person (hi Frank). I’ve now found not one but two homestead curious folks at a spa. The same spa! (Hi Kylie & Lorraine!)

I’ve got a general philosophy in life that you should be a beacon. We are responsible for our light and maintaining it. But are we not equally responsible for shining it into the darkness?

I’d like to see my broadcasting into the abyss of the internet as being a sort of existential lighthouse. Perhaps my chatty nature is some form of the same ambition. I want my people to find me.

And wouldn’t you know it but I’m always finding people searching for the same things. I have so many pockets of knowledge. And I want to share what I know with you. I want you to share your knowledge with me too. Your world and your experiences will add to mine just as mine adds to yours. Like the Borg but decentralized.

I’ve got a lot of weirdly specific knowledge. You know, Julie Fredrickson shit. And I want the folks who need the light I’ve cultivated to find me. So I will broadcast.

I know how to be in my body even with illness. I know about inflammation and healing from post viral shit. I know about sovereignty and survival and independence. I know a thing or two about being a doomer and an optimist.

I’ve got weirder more specifics knowledge too. Ask me about corporate governance structures and decentralized autonomous organization. Or the most cost effective luxury unbranded retinols. Or what biometrics to track and on what devices.

The point is that I’m here to be a chatty Cathy. And if you’d like to talk just slide into my DMs on Twitter. Or email me. It’s my first name dot last name at gmail. Consider this your bat signal.

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 837 and Hairless

Many moons ago, I ran an advertising network for independent publishers. Our niche was lifestyle content like fashion & beauty. It was in the early years before social media had gotten beyond blogging and someone like me could be considered an influencer. During these halcyon years, I was loaned a Tria laser hair remover device to review on my own blog.

If you aren’t familiar with the basic concept, you can permanently remove hair by killing the hair follicles with laser light. It works well if you are fair skinned with dark hair. I don’t recall exactly the terms of my original use but my ambition was modest. I wanted to shave my legs less.

I was the kind of woman for whom one cool breeze would make my freshly shaven legs prickly. I needed to shave daily to keep things smooth and I found that to be inconvenient from a cost and time perspective. So I set out with this handheld laser zapping my lower legs every two weeks. I did this for a total of twelve sessions. And fuck it if I wasn’t surprised that it worked.

I went from having daily dark hair growth on my legs to maybe having do a proper shave once a week to get rid of the light fuzzies. I remain astonished it worked. Sure it took a couple months of use and it’s not perfect but I’ve regretted not using it on other areas ever since. It really cut down on shaving. So recently I decided to buy one. Yup, I spent $499 on a laser to remove hair.

It’s my intention to laser off the hair on my armpits and my “undercarriage” if you will. They call it a bikini area but let’s be honest. I want to have a permanent Brazilian wax. I am going to laser my lady bits and my back door. Assuming I can reach it myself.

I’ll happily answer questions about this as I go about the process. Some of what I intend to do is beyond what’s recommended but thanks to Reddit and gossip I’m pretty sure it’s entirely possible. So feel free to ask me. Or not. Up to you.

Categories
Community

Day 835 and Weird

I was very inspired by a Twitter thread from Anna Gat last week on how the weirdos who had dealt with their identities were having an easier time as millennials hit forty. I thought it was so incisive I’ll include it in full here.

I’ve spent much of 2023 meditating on conformism. As old friends are turning 40, I notice a lot of nameless unhappiness brewing. Millennial unhappiness is a taboo. I always thought people chose norminess because there’s more individual contentment involved. I’ve changed my mind. I see: a fear of change, resentment, a feeling of being stuck, no way out. The Great Resignation / nomadism / self-employment trends / monogamy revolutions that we discuss here haven’t touch large swaths of the bourgeoisie. I see 40 year olds, with money, relations, just give up.
This upsets me surprisingly much because? Because I didn’t pay attention to this group, maybe, so I didn’t see it coming. I always thought normies had had it figured it out (while I hadn’t). Plus I know these people’s parents, I can see them morph into them too soon, unnoticed. Please, please, people: rebel.
It is not too late. You do matter. You don’t have to continue doing something that looked like a good idea 12 years ago if you found out you hate it. Change things. Get up. Move. Live.
Life goals: more experience, but not more bitterness. Hard!

If you haven’t figured out who you at some point that lack of work on yourself will catch up to you. I’ve always been a bit of a weirdo. I’m off. My version of reality matches other weirdo’s realities much better than consensus reality. I am alas not fully normie. I can be a normie in some areas but I’ve got too much “off” to fully be mainstream.

And I have to admit I’m happier for it. I’m happy to have a weird life. All my decisions that didn’t quite make sense at the time have yielded a life that is so much bigger than I ever imagined for myself that I’m think the power of being weird must be immense.

We are entering an era where everything is getting much weirder much faster than any one human can keep up with. And isn’t that just so exciting? And it may be a good thing because as the various tech and AI prognosticators will tell you an era of weirdening is upon us. We will all be hurtling into a weird new future and best we can hope for is that maybe some of it rhymes with history. Hang tight and stay flexible.