If this not-at-all humblebrag is confusing to you, let me explain why 1337 is a joking milestone to an internet kid like myself.
Leet, also known as “1337” or leetspeak, is a form of modified spelling used primarily on the internet. It involves replacing letters with numbers or other characters that resemble the original letters, creating a unique orthography. For example, “leet” can be spelled as “1337” or “l33t”
I’m no h4x0r but I’m not a n00b to being extremely online. While a being on the fourth year of a daily writing habit is nothing to scoff at I’ve been on WordPress for close to twenty years. It feels good to be leet at something as extremely online as blogging.
We are so close to being out of the long horror that is Summer. I’m ready for a change. I can almost taste it. The temperature hasn’t really dropped yet but the shortening of the days feels like a balm to my nervous system.
Yet oddly it wasn’t nature that cued me in. I saw a tweet from a New Yorker complaining about the 7 train not running on the first weekend of the U.S Open.
With unpredictable and uncanny seasons off from the baseline of my childhood, it can feel like I rely on cultural markers for seasonal shifts more than temperature changes.
I grant a chill in the air may come at random when you live in the high variance mountain West so maybe it fits that a complaint from a city is a better marker as to last call of summer. They like in concrete and need the reminders. Tennis in New York means fashion week is just around the corner.
I’m ready for the season to open. I look forward to pilgrimages to the cities to keep business turning. But I’m going to enjoy one the last weekends before we are all called back to the churn of industry. For those lucky few who harvest I pray for bounty.
I am looking to be distracted from reality. I’d presumed this would be relatively easily accomplished. There are so many ways to be distracted. Mass media is so ubiquitous you can be distracted from reality for the price of adding our data to the algorithms.
Show an interest, some disposable income and the advertisers will find the minimum viable audiences. Those audiences be thrown together until it’s as finely grained as the tagging will allow.
Civilization is great and America pioneers all kinds of ridiculous identities and the markets that coalesce around them. We might even have someone neurodivergent in the 2nd family. Tina Brown is excitedly penning
I’ve never been able to reconcile that we crave being part of a wider population and connected to every day experiences even as our distance from reality is one of the highest status signaling mechanisms available. As relatable as love is as a topic on Netflix there are just as many shows about the lives of favorite flavors of economic elite.
Being unaffected by bitter reality is the American Dream. Maybe we want our ingroups reflected in power so we can remain distracted. Paying attention is exhausting. Maybe we figure if our identity are shown as valuable we can leave behind reality.
It’s not the worst logic. If we’ve made it then surely our group interests will surely be represented. Being out of touch is everyone’s goal. If we can be distracted from reality without soil and economic ruin we’ve made it in America.
Distracting ourselves is the privilege we all seek. While Love on the Spectrum is pretty captivating television and Tina Brown is extolling the shit and fresh honesty of autism I’m still skeptical that any identity is safe from being too far removed from reality.
Being engaged in American politicians is a thankless task. I do not at all begrudge people who tune out of our national politics entirely.
After an assassination attempt, a resignation of a sitting president after a public pressure campaign and two political convention I am in no fine mood about the nation.
My assumption is that this mood is being induced deliberately. It’s no wonder I’ve felt a bit unwell over the past two days. The endocrine fatigue we must all be collectively experiencing. Constant cortisol stimulation is no way to live. I was quoted in a piece about the dissident middle last year.
She thought something had gone wrong with us physically too. “Endocrine systems get fried. There’s too much cortisol, you’ve been running on adrenaline, eventually you tap out. Everyone feels nuts right now,” she said, “because what on earth are we supposed to do with the fact that we’ve had this incredible rate of change for so long. We think we’re keeping up with it, but our bodies are like, ‘Oh, actually no. We have no idea what’s going on.’ ”
And yet I feel compelled to engage on how we are governed. Being steeped in enlightenment values and the collective history of Western Civilization, I have taken as a given that civic involvement is a higher virtue. The capacity to govern and be governed is a noble pursuit of rational men aspiring to more.
I feel even more compelled to engage as a citizen when legacy institutions like the media are less able to maintain trust. If I’m being shown nothing but Pravda but I know it’s not the truth do I have an obligation to speak up?
Regular people have incredible rights in America. I do not always feel like we treat that privilege with the respect it deserves. We have a say.
Don’t let yourself become blackpilled by duels between bad policy and bad people. Our institutions need reform. We cannot continue on with the projects of civilization unless we find ways to collaborate at great scale. You can’t let yourself get exhausted by this daunting task.
I finally finished listening to the Joe Rogan podcast with Peter Thiel. I prefer reading and writing but I put it on at 1.5 speed while exercising and eventually powered through
I’d first encountered Girard at university and through Thiel’s influence pursued further understanding of the topic thanks to Luke’s scholarship on the topic. A quick orientation on the thesis is as follows.
What Gravity Is To Physics, Mimetic Desire Is To Psychology”
Why do you want the things that you want? Well to get back to the Rogan/Thiel podcast, humans are still “monkey see, monkey do” when taking action and pursuing a desire. Mimicry is a powerful explanatory principle for human nature.
Not knowing who or what to emulate is surely a source of anxiety in our current moment. What constitutes the good and the true seems especially unclear in our long now modernity. Which way western man? As social animals we look to each other. If you want to give others something worth mirroring you have that power. Equally who you choose to emulate impacts others. Choose wisely.
Every flavor of nerd is flexing their might. Autistic weebs are claiming their power in the American elite class. And our politicians ans generals should be thrilled. It’s not not a moment too soon to put the engineers in on the great game
Showing off your niche knowledge is a favored elite game. Millenials & Zoomers understand their reality is being built upon arcane information and have gone for the deep cuts to keep up.
While on Tablet I came across their coverage of the Democratic National Convention where bizarre communist fervor from identities as inscrutable as Zoomer Hoxhaists are on display. Enver Hoxha being the infamous (and possibly crazy) communist dictator of Albania and not a good guy. But clearly some idiotic online intellectual has to treat history as if it were finding a cool band.
So if you subscribe to hidden knowledge as social capital then it’s time to read up on Gaetano Mosca and the Italian school of elitism. For discourse watchers, they were notable anti-fascist thinkers.
If you made it through the marathon Joe Rogan episode interviewing Peter Thiel you might have caught the memes about Chimp Empire. Well turns out that’s topical and an approachable angle.
every society could be split between two social classes: the one who rules and the one which is ruled
The current elite class of interests has looked beyond our military industrial complex to to Silicon Valley. They have known for sometime if you want to beat the communists (or the fascists or the oligarchy) then partnering with the new nerd elite is now your move.
If you want an eye to the future then learn the ways of the weeb. Drone warfare and embodied habits? Take it a step further WinterMute. Your transgendered simulated intelligence running that drone was trained on green text and it’s time you learn to speak like a native of the hive mind.
Rise up cat girls! Now is the hour of the weeb. Do it for America. Do it for capitalism. Do it so we get some sick Mecha suits from Uncle Sam.
Election season in American is just so very dumb. I don’t have the energy to even go on a rant about it though I will try.
We’ve got patently ridiculous economic policies coming from both political parties. Price controls and 60% tariffs are not the stuff of booming dynamism and I don’t care what else you are selling if those are my choices.
There is almost no point in attempting explanations of the absurdity of one party or the other as chances are good someone will scream at you if you decide to engage.
Which is a shame as I don’t think we should be tolerating this level of incompetence from our public servants and we should all be asking a lot more questions of politicians.
Moderates and centrists are just about done engaging in the public sphere at all now. There is little profit in expressing an opinion. If you pick a workable corner of the cozy web maybe you can find peace but the public internet is a mess of inanities and cognitive dissonance. Only idiots like me who don’t mind expressing an opinion are still screaming into the abyss of Twitter.
I’d love to be partisan and go in on a political team sometimes just to tune out screeching filter bubbles but I don’t think I’m ready to sacrifice my dignity for peace of mind or tactical advantage.
I also don’t think either party would have me. I’m too much of a capitalist for the Democrats and too much of a liberal for Republicans. Being against populism doesn’t make you popular. And it is just all so dumb.
I can’t get into the details but I learned today that there is an internal metric at an institution based around work I was personally responsible for achieving.
Literally none of the credit has accrued to me because ultimately the thing didn’t really work but the downstream effects of the social credibility I brought really benefit someone I am not sure I’d have wanted to benefit. If I’d had a choice which I very much didn’t. Sometimes your social capital accrues to people you don’t even like.
I like having social capital to spare but I didn’t realize that someone was profiting off of it to such an intense degree till today. Power laws rule everything around me and it’s actually good. Just funny how little credit you month get for something and how much it might benefit someone else.
I don’t even know if I can even politely point it out simply because it’s déclassé to do so. I’ll have to enjoy the the little irony on my own. And believe me I am. Maybe it gets shared in a small circle of folks for whom making money for jerks it’s a fact of life. But I’ll take the credit privately.
I’m a little bit underfed at the moment. If I don’t have someone feeding me I basically don’t eat. And I didn’t eat much this weekend because I was alone. The joyful peace of solitude means I’ll skip every meal I can.
I don’t mind a little feast and famine because I’ve always found food to be at best inconvenient and at worst an actively hostile force that would make me an undesirable fat woman. Elder millennials had terrific culture for women what else can say.
I didn’t come from a family that had a strong culture of food. Scandinavian foods are kind of gross when filtered through American agribusiness. Happy family mealtimes and nurturing through food seems like the stuff of movies not real life. It certainly wasn’t my experience as a kid.
I’ve had years where I was able to look at food as fuel but those were mostly when I was very dedicated to athletic pursuits.
Alas that’s in the past for me thanks to age and disease. I’m happy I’m healthy enough to squat a few times a week and be out of bed for multiple hours at a time. And that’s still a struggle with my ankylosis.
I don’t crave food or have intrusive thoughts about it. I mostly just don’t like to eat and it has surely contributed to a genetic propensity to weight gain especially when it’s been combined with steroids to manage my autoimmune condition. If I were my body I wouldn’t speed up my metabolism either.
I better force myself into a meal right now because as tempting as it is to just not eat it’s a bad habit. But if someone just solves the problem of food I’d be the first person in line. Especially now that the American food system is beyond tainted. Like truly how can we have the fire to burn if our fuel is this bad?
I am hunkering down for a Friday evening at home. Batten down the hatches, secure the chickens in their coop, turn on the security system and lock the doors kiddos because the circus is here.
We don’t live in the town of Bozeman thankfully but comfortably far enough into rural county land that we shouldn’t be bothered.
Nevertheless when something big comes to town, and it’s harder to imagine something bigger than a political rally, it can get in the way of basic routines like grocery shopping or picking up prescriptions at the pharmacy.
I was doing a few errands over the lunch hour and traffic was crawling as trucks decked out in flags paraded through town. It was actually quite festive even if it slowed everything down.
Trump is speaking at 8pm and already by noon the rumor on local chats and news websites was that the indoor arena was nearly full with early arrivals.
There is a portion of 19th street where local farmers sell fruit and vegetables on the side of the road. Today it was packed with booths selling Trump paraphernalia instead of cherries or sweet corn. I
think the most astonishing flag I saw was “Cum-Allah Harris” but it was otherwise your usual MAGA fair with lots of signs for local Republican candidates as well.
Slow traffic and roadside flag sales
I didn’t get any close up pictures as I was trying to avoid the scene but I did a little bit of looking as I drove by. I’m hoping it brings good business to restaurants, bars and motels though in truth August is already so popular a time to be in Bozeman we don’t really have much capacity.
I’m safely back home long before anything has kicked off and I indeed to keep it that way. Don’t invite trouble and trouble won’t find you. But I look forward to hearing stories from friends and neighbors. Maybe I’ll watch the livestream.
