Tag: Play

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
Internet Culture

Day 821 and No Joke

I’ve never been much of a fan of April Fools. I like pranks and jokes but I’ve always found the idea of forced merriment to be a bit of cultural drudgery. Most holidays have a bit of marketing attached but April Fools feels like all marketing and no meaning attached.

Despite my dislike I was surprised to see April Fool’s come around and see almost no jokes or pranks. The closest I got was seeing a shitposter buddy of mine Alex Cohen declare he was becoming a leadership poaster. Fun and harmless good stuff. But otherwise it felt like crickets.

I hazarded a guess that it might be because everyone is feeling a bit gun shy. Lots is going on and most corners of the internet feel like they could pop off at any moment. Twitter is has the tension of a neighborhood under siege in some corners. Lots of ingroup fighting is happening in particularly contested spaces like crypto and politics. You can tell it’s information warfare out there.

In that environment I guess no one wants to hazard a shot. It’s too embarrassing to consider that your fire dunk might accidentally be regarded as World War 3’s Franz Ferdinand moment. No laughing matter indeed.

Categories
Internet Culture Media Startups

Day 815 and Kayfabe

Here is a mindfuck for you. Pretending works. The mimicry of the thing occasionally, though not mostly, can lead to having the real thing. Fake it till you make it” works if you’ve got a long enough runway to allow for take off. If you’ve judged the resources correctly is more art than science but you should still be able to do the math.

There are, of course, laws of physics to account for in all of this but your reality is more fungible than you realize. I wouldn’t try manifesting a whole fantasy world, but if you are Brandon Sanderson you might have a shot. That guy rocks.

In discussing whether it is better to fire founders or product managers on Twitter today I got to see a lot of the cargo cult culture of Silicon Valley coming off a high. A lot of people can perform innovation and we’ve maybe even got it down to being well liked by financial markets. But sometimes you actually do have to go and do the thing. And you can’t fake it.

If you aren’t familiar with kayfabe, it’s a term used in wrestling. It means you don’t break character loosely. You keep the secret even if everyone is in on it. You can take things a bit too far and the blending of fiction and reality has now given us a reality tv president.

But what happens when you don’t make the jump? Does reality crash in? Will the market punish you for not delivering on a convincing enough value proposition? Do you have to keep your ambition within some scope that can exist in our agreed upon reality? Yes of course. Fuck you it’s called civilization. But every once in a while someone goes from vapor ware to the Revolution. Don’t be so sure you can spot the difference though. Kayfabe doesn’t just fool rubes.

Categories
Media

Day 810 and 90s TV

I’ve not had a lot of spare time for entertainment and recovery in what turned out to be a very busy month. This left me in a small quandary as Alex and I finished both a comedy and a hour long drama right before all hell broke loose.

My husband and I tend to always have a short form sitcom and a longer prestige piece in rotation depending on how tired we are at the end of the day. We’d run through all the comfort shows and couldn’t fathom testing a new something more serious.

I’m not entirely sure how but we decided to pick up two classic 90s era shows. For our comedy we picked That 70s Show and for our drama we picked the procedural NYPD Blue. Our expectations were that these would be easy to watch simple shows without much depth. And boy were we wrong.

I don’t recall watching a ton of television when I was a kid and I doubt I would have been allowed to watch gritty cop dramas. But the way folks kvetch about how network television sucks I went in expecting middle brow fare. Millennials have had both streaming and cable for so long we’ve come to expect tv that caters to our preferences tend to look down on anything made for the masses.

As it turns out, having to appeal to broad swaths of people actually has some advantages. Both shows are steeped in deep emotions and relatability. The writing is snappy and straight forward. The characters are multifaceted even as they work through their personas.

The fact that I’m relating to the struggles of a shitty racist balding drunkard detective and a pack of Wisconsin teenagers is probably a positive thing. Shared humanity is getting lost in consumer preferences and social identities.

We think unless we see ourselves on the screen we couldn’t possibly relate. And I’ll say I’ve appreciated more representation in entertainment as I often feel hopelessly un-relatable. A

nd yet I’m enjoying relating to humans that never even existed as portrayed by professional liars. So maybe there is something in that. The human experience is the thing, not that the experience must demonstrate it’s connection to your life.

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 793 and Pretty Skills

My mother has always had a gift for aphorisms. I am grateful she has this talent as I’ve been able to simply repackage her wisdom and look much more talented than I actually am at delivering pull quotes. Brevity is the soul of wit and my mother is very witty.

One of the pithy witticisms I believe I learned from her is a classic take on beauty and class being more fungible than we are led to believe.

Pretty is a skill set

Me and/or my mother

If you’ve ever hung out with a bunch of rich girls and wondered why they are all hot consider the dilemma solved. It’s a skill that is cultivated. Like any skill you cultivate or with time but also money. And if you are rich and white the path to beauty is a lot shorter than you might realize. It’s pretty fucked.

I’ve been lucky enough to cultivate this skill set over time. I’ve come to rely on it as part of my arsenal. But I’ve also got a bit of a cranky body so I’ve not always been able to consistently practice the various skills required.

And sometimes life just gets in the way. I look like a fucking mess today. After a week cooped up in an air conditioned room in Mexico with trips outside for slightly traumatic family emotional bonding, I look like shit.

My hair is unsettled and popping off static electricity. I’ve got small pimples all across my forehead. I’ve got patches of eczema on my right chin. I do not appear to have the skill set for pretty today.

Normally I do my best to hide in these circumstances. Especially if I don’t trust someone. I don’t like looking like I lack skill when it comes to presentation. And it is often a sign of respect to look well groomed and beautiful.

In fact, today we’ve got a houseguest that normally I’d feel required to be at full skill set capacity around. And I just didn’t feel like it was necessary. And that’s a skill set worth cultivating too.

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 743 and Wandering

I took some time to go wandering today. I’ve been in Prague for six days but it’s been such a mess I haven’t actually felt like I’ve been in the city.

I like to get to know cities by walking. If I’ve only been in a cab or an Uber I don’t have a sense of place. I need to walk to feel like I’ve landed in a place. While I love a good resort destination now and again, I find it hard to feel grounded without being able to roam.

I wonder if being raised in a small town affected this at all. I wasn’t really a suburban kid. We had suburbs in my town but you still went to a downtown core where kids would walk from the library to the high school to the pedestrian mall. Walking was entertainment for my teenage years.

Now as an adult I find nothing more liberating than just walking for as long as you can. Being wedded to a destination or a GPS mapped route feels too much like having to do something or be somewhere. But wandering around with no place to be tastes like freedom. You are still in charge of your own life if you can go for a long walk with no purpose.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 720 and Good Inputs

I’ve been enjoying how relaxed and open everyone is this week. A good chunk of folks are out on break for Christmas (with the requisite nod to Chanukah) and it’s making for delightful conversations and relaxed interactions.

Having more time to attend to your life clearly is beneficial for everyone. I know it’s been a frantic year. Heck it’s been a frantic couple of years. And being frantic fucks you up. I feel like I repeat this constantly, but being in fight or flight on a permanent basis is bad for you.

So it’s nice to see people have space to breathe. I love seeing people bring more of themselves to an encounter. I’ve had so many great connections with people this week. It’s shown up in my fundraising. I’ve seen it in my deal flow. I’ve enjoyed it in every interaction I’ve had this week.

It makes me wish more people could have the space to give themselves the right inputs in their lives. It won’t be the same for everyone. But it really does help when people have the basics like sleeping, eating, exercising and other “taking care of their body” activities time. I hope that everyone remembers the joy of the season is from giving everyone around us grace. And that includes ourselves.

Categories
Aesthetics Startups

Day 714 and Cosmetic Organization

I used to be the CEO of a cosmetics company called Stowaway. We were a direct to consumer brand that manufactured and retailed our own line of travel sized makeup. Alas I got too sick to work and we sold the company to a private equity holding firm who shuttered it during the pandemic. I’m “shocked” that travel sized red lipstick wasn’t popular during two years of masking and lockdown.

I don’t particularly want to work in cosmetics again, even though I have arguably priceless experience that could be put to good use helping other brands. Startups are are traumatic and it’s not unusual for founders to find it challenging to work in spaces they know well. You don’t want to undermine the enthusiasm of founders. Also you’ve probably taken enough risks for a lifetime in a given space to never want to touch it again even if you made money.

But I do still enjoy being a consumer of cosmetics. I’ve got what might be the most comprehensive library of travel sized makeup in existence. I moved all of it up to Montana this year where it lives in a modestly organized vanity. For some reason I decided do a little reorganization of it today.

A very messy cosmetics vanity littered with makeup bags, travel sized packaging and a Sephora advent calendar.

Instead of finding a new schema for where I plan to keep all my products, I made it much worse. I let myself get a little bit of tunnel vision and instead of playing around for half an hour I spent an ungodly amount of time making it much worse. I’ve got drawers that are bursting with tiny mascaras, tiny lipsticks, tiny eye shadow palettes and thousands of other items.

I was surprised to find myself enjoying it. I did some comparisons of packaging and formulations and found that I was still quite pleased with what we had built. Many new brands have emerged since then but the promise of a minimalist purse friendly brand remains elusive. I see all the ways I failed but I also saw all the ways in which our team succeeded. And it was nice to feel like perhaps I’d learned something. But now I’ve got to clean it all up before my husband steps on an eyeliner.

Categories
Travel

Day 713 and Travel Logistics

I’m planning my first international trip since we moved to Montana. I will be going to Prague for a couple weeks in January if you happen to be around. And the logistics are very much only for experienced travelers.

I’ve not yet had to fly out through the Bozeman Airport but Alex tells me it is easy and straight forward. We have many short hops to international airports. The real issue seems to be that with a pilot shortage getting out of hand, arranging layovers eats up more of your travel time. Airlines are less able to do hub banking with their flights so I will be enjoying a six hour layover in Munich. Finally all my German lessons on Duolingo will get a property stress test.

I love optimizing for Airbnbs when I travel. I have a lot of little details that I look for when I’m going to be somewhere long enough to settle in. For instance, I like to cook my own meals. I like to be walking distance to a grocery store so I can pick up ingredients and cook when the mood strikes. That can be trickier if you are staying in a downtown area. So I look to be near the major neighborhoods but maybe just a bit off the beaten path.

I managed this quite well in Frankfurt last year where I was a short 10 minute walk to a high end grocery store in one direction while also being only 15 minutes from the main shopping area and farmers market in the other. I didn’t take a single cab or Uber the entire time except to get to the airport. It was absolutely perfect planning for enjoying living as if Frankfurt were my home.

I think I’ve achieved this for Prague. I found a cute spot that is equidistant to to most of the sights I want to see as well as the errand and obligations on my itinerary. I am yet again attempting to help someone with an American visa so I wanted to be near the embassy. But the embassy row isn’t much for other amenities like grocery and nightlife so I found a spot on a small park next to all the crucial shops. I am excited so if you have suggestions I am all ears.

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 704 and Nothing Is Real

One of my favorite science fiction series is Ian M Bank’s Culture series. Attempting to give a basic premise is a bit of a disservice to the sweeping space opera, but the TLDR is advanced artificial intelligence has spread humanity’s descendants to the stars in a massive pan-galactic utopian civilizational diaspora.

This future transhuman utopia has finally reconciled humanity’s inherent lack of cognitive processing power and set about flourishing in other ways, while our various AI friends, the Minds, make sure we are kept fed, watered and sheltered in sundry starships, megastructures and planets.

The Culture regularly engages in wars and espionage as it absorbs new species and civilizations, sees others off to the enlightenment (called the Sublimed) and generally gets up to batshittery because sometimes AI is inscrutable. It very fun and if you’ve not read them there is no real order just grab a book and start. If you need a starting place go with Use of Weapons.

The Culture has been on my mind has we are enjoying something of a Cambrian explosion of artificial intelligence generative art tools including the open source Stable Diffusion, OpenAI’s DALL E, and Mid Journey. People have been having a blast creating all kinds of wild imagery. Our tools are rapidly outpacing us in their ability to generate reality.

But I’ll fully admit I didn’t think it was personally that fun to fuck around with until we got a text generator from OpenAI called GPTChat. Surprise surprise I’m more interested in the written word than I am in generative art. I made all kinds of dumb prompts.

And I’m definitely having a bit of a Neo in the Matrix whoa moment with the possibilities. Imagine how much gets automated when our basic communication mechanics are freed from squishy meat space. It’s a long way to a Culture Mind but I definitely had a moment where I thought oh fuck some of us baseline humans are going to struggle to adapt to a manufactured world that isn’t created primarily by other humans. What a fucking trip!

And now I cannot get the Beatles’ Strawberry Fields out of my head. The creative realities emerging from our human minds might not be the dominant ones within my lifetime. I won’t have a clue what is real or what is a fantasy created entirely by machine. And doesn’t that just demand a reassessment of how real is our reality in the first place.

Nothing is real
And nothing to get hung about
Strawberry fields forever

Strawberry Fields

Now the the Beatles were in an LSD phase but most of us are familiar with the glimpses of different realities that underline the shared sentiment that what if in fact nothing is real. But is it such a big deal? Our egos don’t need to get hung up about another tool to remake reality.

But we should be prepared to find out that our world and all our creations might be sharing space with some very strange new ways to mould reality. I cannot wait for the mind fuck personally. I hope I get adopted by a Culture ship with a name like Extentuating Circumstances or Nervous Disposition