Tag: Attention

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Aesthetics Politics

Day 1303 and Toaster F*ckers

If you are someone with a gentle constitution who finds vulgar language or discussions sexual appetites upsetting, this post won’t be for you. I doubt readers like this as one of my most viral pieces was titled“dickriding” but just in case you’ve been warned. I’ll be discussing the toaster fucking problem today.

I’m not a big consumer of pornography nor do I enjoy most fetishes but I generally share the attitude that you shouldn’t yuck someone else’s yum. Millennials are a tolerant sort. Yet I wonder if it’s time for us to revisit philosopher Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance theory.

Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance, introduced in his 1945 work The Open Society and Its Enemies, posits that unlimited tolerance can lead to the demise of tolerance itself. Popper argues that if a society tolerates intolerant ideologies without limits, those ideologies will eventually dominate and suppress tolerance. Therefore, to preserve a tolerant society, it must be intolerant of intolerance.

via PerplexityAI

I’ve have a lot of skepticism about how one executes on being intolerant of intolerance. It’s often illustrated with Nazis. Now there are many ideologies I find intolerable but as an American who believes in free speech I will fight for the right to be intolerant. As long as you aren’t trying to mess with my inviolable rights go ahead with your weird shit sexually, politically or otherwise.

Naturally this has yielded some people who go a lot further than you’d like. There is a Hacker News post that has come to be known as the “toaster fucker problem.” I’ll post it in whole so you can get the flavor of just how far people will go for their weird niche obsessions.

I blame the internet. Back in the days before it, we had to learn to live with those around us, now you can just go out and find someone as equally stupid as yourself.

I call it the toaster fucker problem. Man wakes up in 1980, tells his friends “I want to fuck a toaster” Friends quite rightly berate and laugh at him, guy deals with it, maybe gets some therapy and goes on a bit better adjusted.

Guy in 2021 tells his friends that he wants to fuck a toaster, gets laughed at, immediately jumps on facebook and finds “Toaster Fucker Support group” where he reads that he’s actually oppressed and he needs to cut out everyone around him and should only listen to his fellow toaster fuckers.

Apply this analogy to literally any insular bubble, it applies as equally to /r/thedonald as it does to the emaciated Che Guevara larpers that cry thinking about ringing their favourite pizza place.

Now you think surely internet fetishism has nothing useful to teach me. Surely this sort of thing wouldn’t bleed into serious spaces like politics or economics but after 2016 all bets are clearly off as to the seriousness of our political discourse.

Everyone is fully free to go to the absolute lunatic fringes of every issue because no matter how wild your beliefs you can find someone else online who shares it.

If you want to fuck a toaster not only will you find fellow fetishists but Rule 34 suggests there is probably pornography of it. Who could have guessed the consequences of 1987’s cartoon The Brave Little Toaster right?

Because totally regular people are no longer shamed for being into weird shit you can, and do, see totally regular people discussing weird shit. It’s often hard to judges what real and what’s fake. A Twitter shit poaster went viral for suggesting that Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance fucked a couch. The memes are amazing.

It was was fact checked as false by the AP and other news organizations. The comedians will never let it go as hey these days who knows the guy is a couch fucker. A popular Netflix cartoon called Bigmouth made horny treen fucking a cushion a plot arc so maybe the millennial senator from Ohio might be too.

Now as much as I’m all for presenting all sides of an issue it’s very possible that we can take people at their words. We don’t need to ramp everything up to toaster fucking. It’s perfectly fine to discuss things on the merits without going to the edge of the metaphorical map of social propriety. So I guess I’ll be looking for a copy of Popper on the book shelf this weekend.

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Community Politics

1302 and Virtual Insanity

It’s a crazy world we are living in

A number of my friends and colleagues have descended on Nashville this week for the Bitcoin Conference. I didn’t make the trek as southern heat in mid-July isn’t for me.

Despite being remote, it’s been easy keeping up on the event. I connected various friends who all different politics & interests. It’s been a delight to get selfies and “ussies” sent to me as my network connects in person. My virtual network exist IRL.

Meanwhile back in “extremely online” land where I spend my workday it feels as if the virtual insanity is at a fever pitch.

We’ve been recycling the same fears of virtual worlds since I was a kid. When I was in middle school the big hit was Jamiroquai’s Virtual Insanity.

You may remember it as a catchy funk hit where a gentleman in a big black hat dances through an underground city.

Oh, futures made of, now, virtual insanity
Now we all, we seem to be governed by a love
For these useless twisting of our new technology
And now there is no sound, for we all live underground
Yes, we do, oh

Jamiroquai “Virtual Insanity” c. 1996

It doesn’t seem like much has changed in the intervening quarter century or so. Everything is a twisting of technology as hyper partisans battle for mindshare on who decides on who can owns the virtual world and its creations.

I hope it provides some small comfort that the things we are challenged by not new. Intractable human nature doesn’t change much. So before drowning in the virtual insanity consider doing something in real life. I’d be happy to facilitate introductions.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1299 and If You Aren’t Outraged

Land grant university towns in the American west should be studied for all kinds of reasons. But right now I’d love an old fashioned long form magazine essay on Bumper Sticker culture.

The Subaru plastered in stickers was a fun punchline when I was a kid. You’d chuckle at slogans like “if you aren’t outraged you aren’t paying attention” because you agreed.

If you’re not outraged you’re not paying attentions

If only people were paying attention you’d smugly nod. I use the word smug because in 2006 South Park pointed out the problem with being too smug about having the right opinions is that it alienates people.

And now here we are in 2024 everyone is paying attention. And everyone is outraged. And it sucks. All of this paying attention making us outraged doesn’t seem improve the situation in the slightest.

And everyone is smug as hell being very assured that they have the right opinion even though we appear to have about thousand different ways to prove to yourself that your outrage is justified and it’s the other team isn’t paying attention.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1298 and In My Bones

I got a great night’s sleep according to all trackers. I didn’t feel well when I woke at all despite this.

I had the kind of unsettled unwell feeling that you can’t pinpoint with any precision but you know in your bones something is off. Naturally this meant some shit was about to go down.

We’ve been enduring the summer of political news. The media, the chattering classes and “the opinion leaders” have perfected the art of breaking through even if you don’t pay much attention. And I do pay attention.

I wrote a long essay yesterday on the general state of living in the past’s vision of the future. It’s worth a read if you have an interest in Cyperpunk or anarcho-tyranny. I feel the weight of all the competing narratives fighting for my attention. And I am just tired.

Categories
Biohacking Internet Culture Startups

Day 1297 and Crypto Libertarians in the Age of Cyperpunk Anarcho-Tyranny

We are living in the past’s version of the future. The Cyperpunk I read in my youth is now the stuff of my daily life. It’s not as sleek as in fiction but it’s hard not to feel like it’s William Gibson’s world and I’m just living it.

The clubs looked a little sleazier as we escaped the aughts but we had a renaissance in technical tools for producing culture. Digital music and multimedia have exploded entire social media economies. Could Vernor Vinge be right and our economies will turn to creating data to train for the singularity?

We are only now getting Idoru but we are veering towards Burning Chrome. Half the anime avatars in accelerationist e/acc chats are wearing Mirror Shades and everyone watches for crypto rugs. But we are getting our Mt Gox Bitcoin back right?

What about borderless corporate worlds and mass scale surveillance identity? That’s here too. When William Gibson wrote “Disneyland with the Death Penalty” I wonder if he knew it would be the nexus of the network state debate?

I can turn on club kid techno from 2002 and look at a reality in 2024 and its aesthetic is pretty close to the details Jonny Mnemonic. A global pandemic that affects the nervous system of those infected which was accidentally released from a lab.

Johnny Mnemonic movie poster.

We’ve even got the LoTeks in a Luddite rebellion against a world connected by dubiously transparent artificial intelligence owned by actual Zaibatsu multinationals with more power than nation states. Fact and fiction spinning hyperstition better than Nick Land ever dreamed.

The vulnerability of our entire world to our digital networks was made dramatically apparent yesterday when Crowdstrike took a hot knife through the butter of corporate infrastructure and left us with blue screens of death.

It’s not real but it could be

Snowcrash and Crash Override? It’s better. We got amazing memes and elaborate fakes of the Blue Screen of Death. It actually did suck for airlines and banks because regulatory capture is the stuff of systemic risk.

And lest you think we’ve got no biohacking in this Cyperpunk world after the pandemic we have a renaissance in systemic & holistic approaches to medicine. Suddenly everyone is aware of the risk in agribusiness. Seed oils is normie stuff. Instead of turning Luddite the Danish invented advance metabolic medicine to cope. Everyone is on GLP-1 agonists.

Mix in the rise of nicotine and THC and you’ve got a national post prohibition bloom of folklore cures whose research has been suppressed by pharmaceutical companies and regulatory bodies alike. Conspiracy? Maybe but just the sludge of industry.

When I look at my own work I see the future arriving. We fund decentralized compute and marketplaces for inferences. We fund open source database software. We fund multi-sigs for hyper transactional blockchains. We fund nuclear fission that pulls its materials the sky.

And in that all of the is our founders are global citizens who have to manage anarcho-tyrannical borders with visas controlled by incompetent governments and live through the geopolitics of wars fought with drones and propaganda. The future is already here. It’s actually pretty cool. Just watch out for nervous system tics.

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 1289 and Gap Lounge Pant

My favorite item of clothing is a pair of cotton straight leg lounge pants from the Gap.

A light but body skimming 93% cotton to 7% elastane blend with a simple tie that never felt constrictive. It retailed for $29 and was sold under their “Love” which loosely merchandised with GapBody.

Gap Lounge Pant in Black

They were perfect. I bought two pairs every year and simply never worried about comfortable home wear. Which was a big deal as I had a few years of being quite sick so these pants were life savers.

Gap seems to have stopped selling them sometime in the past two or three years. The core product number is 539570 if you are curious. The last time I was able to buy any was November 2020 and I purchased four of them.

The holy grail of bought pants

If you click into the old product page you will see 1500 reviews. It was a popular item. People on Reddit are looking for them. Mutuals of mine gave them at friends gift events. Leigh was wearing them when she tweeted me that.

Leigh and her friends love them.

And so I’ve set off on a mission to find out why these very popular pants have stopped being made. I’d happily purchase the pattern from the Gap if I could find the vendor for the fabric. I’d put my own money into acquiring it from the brand if they aren’t interested in booting it back up. I want these pants back in my life. I even went so fair as to email the VP of Merchandising at Gap Inc today. Maybe I’ll get lucky and she emails me back.


I apologize for the intrusion but I thought perhaps as the leader of merchandising at Gap you may be the executive who can answer a strange question. 

What happened to the cotton Gap Lounge Pant? 

They were the best lounge pants on the market. I bought them for over a decade. And they are simply gone. The product number is 539570

I very much want to buy more of them as they are my daily wear and I will pay whatever it takes to get more.  And is there anything I can do to buy any remaining dead stock of it?
Can I help your team
make a case to to bring it back? Is it possible for me to acquire the pattern and fabric from the corporation so I can have them made myself? 

Categories
Community

Day 1273 and Context Window

The fracturing of the social web has made it harder to connect person to person.

The enjoyment of sharing a platform or a protocol with other humans is undermined as grifters and opportunists bang against artificial intelligence slop and algorithmic manipulation. It’s just not as fun to be online in that atmosphere.

I happen to like putting a little more of humanity out here on the edges of the great social media seas. I am not everyone’s cup of tea but at least you know what flavor I am.

Perhaps humans need longer context windows just as much as our artificial intelligence. I’ll allow Google’s Keyword blog on DeepMind’s longer context window to explain.

Context windows are important because they help AI models recall information during a session. Have you ever forgotten someone’s name in the middle of a conversation a few minutes after they’ve said it, or sprinted across a room to grab a notebook to jot down a phone number you were just given? Remembering things in the flow of a conversation can be tricky for AI models, too — you might have had an experience where a chatbot “forgot” information after a few turns. That’s where long context windows can help.

What is a long context window?

Part of my affection for “blogging” whether it’s on my own WordPress powered website or Twitter (remember when we called it a microblogging service?) is that it gives the chance to establish a large context window for me.

You can definitely make predictions about me based on what I’ve shared. If I am as complex as million token window (which is what Google’s Gemini can now handle) I would honestly be surprised. So go ahead and augment any conversations you have with me with the wider context of Julie. It’s my goal that it allows us to connect better.

Categories
Biohacking Emotional Work

Day 1271 and Documenting Practices

The winding roads of spiritual practice often cross paths with the more practical minded subcultures interested in practicalities.

Doing a thing can be more enjoyable than documenting a thing but documenting turns out to be quite helpful in helping others learn to do things.

As we knit together our individual experiences our capacity to measure and systematize improves which in turn scales access if you are inclined to experiment. Getting a look at more than our personal n of 1 enables us to practice kitchen table science in areas prone being illegible or inscrutable.

I believe we are accelerating a number of types of revivalism thanks to the network effects of the internet colliding with religious and spiritual traditions.

One area where I am tracking this has been Silicon Valley’s exploration of meditative practices and mindfulness. I read a wonderful piece by Jake Eaton today about his experiences with jhana practices. If you are interested in learning the practicalities of this type of practice Nadia Asparouva has documented it extensively as well.

There has been a rising interest in codification of various mindful and meditative practices in a number of my syncretic cultures. Engineering dharma bum connective mental map mindfulness seems to be an archetype doing the work of documenting.

Handing people what was once hidden knowledge naturally makes some people skeptical. We’ve gone from sharing breathing practices to documenting achieving spiritual ecstasy.

Categories
Community Politics

Day 1268 and Intergenerational

We seem to be stuck in a kind of 90s loop of “talk to the hand” intergenerational dismissal. Boomers can’t communicate with millennials, millennials can’t talk to anyone older or younger than them, Gen X is smugly off in the corner and Zoomers are stimming through an anxiety attack.

I myself have complex feelings about the choices older generations of Americans have made. I am not thrilled with the world we are inheriting.

But I am not so convinced we intergenerational relationships are doomed by the most selfish among us. Though I certainly see how looking at a ballot this year might give you the impression that the divide is impassable.

The time I spend in policy and politics gives me hope. It’s possible to find the bonds of past and future in working to find solutions. I see committed people from all generations trying to do their part. I’d like there to be more of us.

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 1263 and Hoe-flation

As I run out the clock on the last vestiges of my Covid infection (two fucking weeks give me a break), I’ve had the pleasure of being extremely online.

There has been a bit of a kerfuffle on the costs of being “a well kept cosmopolitan woman” with varying levels of push back that are functionally regurgitating the plot of The Devil Wears Prada.

Breakdown of the costs of a “well-maintained” attractive woman in a large U.S. city:
hair: $400/every 2-3 months at least
facials: $200-300/mnth
fitness: $200-400/mnth
cosmetics: $100-300/mnth
nails: $100+/mnth
brows: $15-40/mnth
waxing/laser: $100-$150/mnth
med spas: $1k/every 3 mnths at least
And doesn’t even include clothes or shoes!

Expressions of feminine presentation through grooming is what the academics like to call “contested space” but you can probably get the gist of how it through it by skimming Veblen, Baudrillard and old issues of Cosmopolitan.

Needless to say, most women are not $10,000 Instagram models, professional girlfriends, trophy wives or professionals in glamour industries. This spend is extreme and for people who life off their image.

I’ve been a peon in the image business and I’ve been a girlboss and it’s a bit exhausting if you are not young, naturally beautifully or able to afford the upkeep. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it. I’ve watched many rounds of influencer burnout. I am blessed with good skin, good hair, the knowledge of my professional background and cosmetology school, and I have money to spend on myself.

Hair: $80 2x a year
Facials: $0
Fitness: $0 on gym or classes but we do have a barn squat rack & a mortgage
Cosmetics: $100-200 a month it’s my hobby & former profession
Nails: $50 for pedicures 6x
Brows: $0
Waxing: $90 4x year
Med Spa: Botox $220 every 120 days

I am myself in the middle ground of expensive personal presentation. I like everything about cosmetics from makeup to haircare. I posted my own breakdown above and it’s about $250 a month.

I don’t dye or heat style my hair, I am not heathy enough to be a gym rat (I wish I was), I get pedicures because it’s hard to do my own with my spinal problems but don’t get my nails done, I wax downstairs for personal preferences, I love skincare and at 40 it seemed time to get a light dose of Botox seasonally.

Which is in my book quite a bit of money to spend on appearances. It’s the opulence I allow myself on the other side of some financial success and I justify it by saying it’s worthwhile to keep up on my old industry.

My husband says it’s mostly an excuse to buy makeup I’ll never wear and he is naturally quite right. It’s a hobby like any other. I’m glad I can justify it for work though.

Social media comparisons for lifestyles that are simply beyond most people’s reach shouldn’t be considered aspirational. My spending should level not considered aspirational on this either if I’m candid. I could easily get away with less and look good.

The good news is that for bargain hunters who want to combat hoe-flation costs in their life is that we’ve never had better access to quality grooming. We have cheap actives brands like the Inky List and the Ordinary, access to the best Korean biochemists, and excellent buyers clubs.

It’s never been easier or cheaper to learn to be well groomed. I very much advocate for looking your best as it reflects a commitment to caring for yourself and your body. Just don’t get carried away when a $16 product can do the job of the $200 one ok? Ask me if you need advice on what to buy.