Tag: Stream of Consciousnesses

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Chronicle Culture Travel

Day 1820 and The Christmas Story Is About Systems of Record

The Christmas story is almost too layered to with truth to hold any but universal mythic truths this far from its historical origin.

We hear parables of the unexpected guest who arrives late at night seeking shelter. We are taught about the faith we must have in our families even when they ask us to believe in the impossible.

But today I think of how even two thousand years ago, Christ’s birth was a story about record keeping and census taking.

The Gospel of Luke (2:1) says Caesar Augustus issued a decree that “all the world” should be registered, so “everyone went to their own town to register.”

Imagine putting a pregnant woman on a donkey just to be sure you’ve got the proper tax regime in place. Empire is as Empire does.

In America the census comes to you. In Rome the census journey was the means by which Jesus’ birth occurs in Bethlehem, aligning the birth story with messianic expectations.

Death and taxes being the only reliable thing under the sun, I’d probably want my system of record keeping for a miraculous birth to be tied to such reliable means. Even then history isn’t quite sure about this specific census.

Why am I thinking about systems of record keeping on this holy day? Well I suppose it’s because on religious holidays days I have the space to consider what our future systems of record may be and how we will weave together the miracles that may show us the future of who we are to be as humans and as Christians.

Accounting and record keeping are relatively new inventions in the grand scheme of human development. Tribal knowledge assumed we could keep track. Empires needed a bit more structure and a lot more systems of record keeping.

What will we need as the nation state change and reform and the empires of this century are formed more by context graphs and nodal pathways than census takers and taxmen?

We are reinventing the living records of decisions we once traced through men of power and means but are now stitched through corporate entities, personal trusts, accounting norms and our attempts to find sources of ground truth we can all agree upon.

Trust and power dictated that in the past but now we need new ways. We must explain not only what happened but how it happened and verify it across decentralized systems in open systems even when much of our knowledge is tied in closed systems and protocols whose rules we’ve never fully articulated expect to a few high priests how they run run.

Technical documentation becomes precedent as Jay Gupta of Foundation Capital said in a thread. I bet he didn’t expect that to end up in a Christmas story either. Funny how life and history works isn’t it? Merry Christmas to us all. And may the day bring you tidings of great joy. Or at least a protocol handshake that is a bit easier than heading to Judea by donkey.

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Culture Emotional Work

Day 1819 and So You’re Safe Enough To Celebrate With Rest

I prefer Christmas Eve to Christmas Day. What traditions my family had were mostly oriented around the night before Christmas and not Christmas Day itself.

We’d have a Christmas Eve dinner, our one item per person gift exchange, and most excitingly staying up for midnight mass with my mother

Christmas Day meant Christmas stockings and a jumble of different half heartedly attempted Christmas wishes and lots of long distance calls. Much less fun from a child’s perspective than gifts and late night ceremony.

So here I am on Christmas Eve all prepared for tomorrow’s day of stillness and rest. And I am exhausted. My body has sensed it’s safe to collapse into the kind of sickness that only comes after cortisol washes away on the tides of adrenaline going out to sea.

I’ve got not plans. My worship has never required a church. My prayers are between myself and my maker. I’ll be sick and happily collapsed into my own quiet reflection. May peace be with you.

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Aesthetics Emotional Work Travel

Day 1818 and Jouissance

With all of the preparations that go into a day of rest, it can be oddly easy to forget that the purpose was of rest is to restore one’s mind and body.

Rejuvenation, be it body or soul, doesn’t occur immediately. I don’t find anything that involves refilling one’s energy happens quickly.

Jouissance in the Lacanian psychoanalytic tradition suggests that embodied enlivened enjoyment goes beyond pleasure and pain. To rest one must have exerted oneself first.

Now being French, Lacanians mean sexually but I mean generally. Embodied things take time and not all pleasure is free of pain.

Maybe that’s why it there can be as much enjoyment in the toil of preparations for travel or a day of rest as it is to reach one’s destination or take a day off.

I personally find it challenging to really rest unless I’ve gone through all of the many preparations required to do so. Being constantly in motion managing the logistics of moving through life never lets up.

The Lacanians must know something about the nature of women (and men). I’ll let Star Trek’s Spock explain.

After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing, after all, as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true.

Maybe it’s good to spend so much time in preparation and waiting. Christmas comes but once a year but the preparations can be endless if you so desire.

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Aesthetics

Day 1817 and Magnesium

Not everyone has decent bathtubs. For a good chunk of my life and also in current chunk, I lacks for a decent bathtub. We’ve got an astonishing array of other marvelous ways to heal but not a good soaking tub.

I almost never get to enjoy a warm leisurely bath. I am not a hot tub person. I’ve got sensitive skin and the chemicals involved are not an environment for my skin.

I am alas a great fan of bathing in epsom salts. It is a cure for almost every ailment.

So it was this attitude with which I tried to run myself a bath in a remote location and I failed to consider the tank I was dealing with compared to the size of the soaking tub. Which was generously deep. A terrible and obvious mistake.

A lukewarm tub was my reward. And don’t I look silly for not obey a basic detail. Otherwise a very relaxing day which I would have enjoyed topping off with a soak.

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Aesthetics Chronic Disease Travel

Day 1816 and Bedding Down

Having put no small amount of effort into preparing to be quietly away from the world for Christmas, I have made myself a very cozy in the chosen retreat.

Preparing for a closed world means I’ll have the freedom to close down myself. My body has been a bit up and down as it usually goes s these days so I’d like to log as many hours in restful response as I can.

Other activities I’d enjoy would be bathing in a warm tub, going for peaceful walks with no one around and reading for hours on end. Which seems manageable. It’s a time for prayer and contemplation.

My only wrinkle is the lack of available prepared food. I mentioned I’d be rather remote. And I did pack as much as was feasible

But if I can’t manage a few days of cooking simple meals like pasta and chicken that would be pretty sad. I’m lucky to have relied on that part of my life being handled by others as I do find the idea of cooking to be almost as tiring as the reality.

All of that moving around on hard kitchen floors as you juggle timers and fire is not a favored activity for someone with spinal issues. Still I’m optimistic if I stick to a quiet routine of reflection, rest and prayer maybe I’ll manage. Or perhaps a miracle will occur and I’ll be fed literally and spiritually.

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Community Internet Culture

Day 1809 and Hating Content Management Systems

I’ve been using WordPress for a long time. Like rounding the corner to twenty years (in actuality going on 17) of time in the open source content management system.

Blogging was the new hot thing when I was in college. Blogging platforms emerged out of the strange tendency millennials and Gen Xers had for publicly sharing their own self reflection. I presume we got this from the Me Generation who raised us.

“I learned it from you Mom and Dad!”

Those early generations of social media all had flavors of being oriented towards writing with some multimedia mixed into mediums that were immersive and hyperlinked m but also narratives shared in reverse chronological order because the norm.

We went from Geocities to Livejournal to blogger, Typepad (RIP), and WordPress over the course of a few booms and busts. If you were blogging before 2005, you probably could have made a career out of it.

I don’t just mean writing, though lots of bloggers because professional writers, but whole online communities turned into careers from fashion and beauty to legal and financial.

Alas, the type of person who might once have made a wonderful career out of being a writer was caught out by the gutting of print media. America lost especially the kinds of middle class aspirant jobs that local news and independent publishers once provided for all kinds of creatives.

I’ve watched many platforms attempt to replace media jobs. Tumblr once hired a stable of writers. So did Medium. Neither ended well for anyone. Watching the comings and go of platforms and networks instilled a kind of paranoia in me about owning your own space.

I prefer posting under my own name on my own domain on an open source maintained piece of software as a back. I don’t pretend like I own my distribution on any social media channels. I’m sure Twitter will always be around wink wink.

So I am inclined to distrust Substack though I am reading more and more on the platform and I’ve enjoyed writing my own beauty blog there in the last few months. Thus far they managed to thread the needle on making money and making a social network and I don’t feel fearful that it will suddenly disappear like I once did.

Which is really a shame as it’s designed almost completely for the Gen C and Millenial set who really wished they had media jobs. The most successful did have media jobs and realized they could make more as an independent niche like the venture beat or by pandering to a very specific demographic or market that the giant media platforms don’t like.

These professionals class writers have a preference set for how they do content management and writing that just doesn’t remotely overlap with how I like to write. They want easy peasy hit publish. I want mobile. I want cross platform writing. It’s funny to finally have a content management system solve for monetizing and it’s just not made for me. But distribution and payment matters so I’m not booting up anything on my own without handling that first.

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Finance Internet Culture Politics

Day 1807 and Set Hyperparameters to Dumb

As much as I’m trying to salvage the end of my year by taking it slow, I’m still keeping myself plugged in. There is no unplugging in our hyperreality.

I’ve accepted this is a part of being human for the time being. I don’t struggle with internet addiction even if understand how it can be for others.

So here I am keeping an eye on various market movers like central bank rate cuts and earnings calls. It’s a shame I didn’t go into banking as it’s a lovely hobby I just happen to enjoy it watching the data go by.

The intake of long insight and slow instincts interplays with short data and animal spirits if you can stomach it. For me at least I don’t make moves based on any given day.

I find impossible to make much sense of the here and now, so the best I we can do (at least those suitably complex situations) is make very long plays or extremely short ones. I wouldn’t want to plan for a middle distance. Pity the politicians operating on two year schedules.

I’m glad I make long plays if it’s a choice between long and short. I wouldn’t want to edge out small gains in the algorithms like my quant friends do. Too much is out of distribution and nothing is ever really priced in. Cliff Asness is right. Markets have become less informationally efficient. Information becoming free made insights almost impossibly expensive.

For me it’s silly to make grand claims of sensemaking as we bumble from “so over” to “so back” by the hour. I’ll never compete with that.

What do we need over the next decade? How about two or three? That’s my plan. Anything else risks tip toeing between hyper tulip mania and the deepest depths of the Great Recession trough. I’m amazed we’ve shaved off volatility as long as we have. Apres Boomers, le deluge? Reality feels like hyperparameters are deliberately set to dumb.

And so Wendell Berry is now percolating up not just through the permaculture hippies, Monsanto fighting eco-terrorists and nouveau TradCaths but in the feeds of my design hipsters too.

Williamsburg taste by way of pastor parents has found its way back to the Kentucky poet. Back to the land didn’t take for the Boomers but maybe this time it’s different. (Only if you are landed gentry).

“The cure proves incurable.”

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Chronic Disease Emotional Work

Day 1806 and Trying Not To Upset My Proverbial Applecart

I have had way too many minor (and major) health problems emerge over the course of 2025. Adding in personal life tragedies (the death of my father) and I had a challenging year.

So I trying to keep the last few weeks of the year crisis free. I have already pulled myself out of the day to day to try for a slow wind down of the year. No holiday parties or appearances for me. I am gone.

As I slow down and put distance between myself and the world, I maybe stupidly see it as an opportunity to nudge myself on little health promoting efforts.

After the year I’ve had, I so desperately want to see improvements. Even if simply not collapsing into another infection cycle is a win.

I’ve been trying to consistently work on body basics like muscular compensation patterns and getting more steps each day, but I’m so terrified that even a minor miscalculation in exertion will upset my proverbial apple cart.

I went for a walk on a high mold count day and reached for prednisone. I’ve been teetering on the wrong side of recovery for so long I don’t think I can recall a genuinely good day. My sleep is similarly impacted. I want to have a long night of deep sleep and dream cycles but the best I can manage is just a long night.

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Internet Culture Startups

Day 1805 and Dark Leisure, Time Violence & Outputting Value

Any other software developers out there remember the mythical man hour? It comes from Fred Brooks’ classic book The Mythical Man–Month which argues that adding more people to a late software project often makes it even later. This is also known as Brooks’s Law.

The man‑hour is “mythical” when tasks are not perfectly partitionable and require significant communication, shared context, and integration.

I think in the age of artificial intelligence we need to be revisiting this classic complexity insight as it applies across a world where we understand even less about how the time of input drives its notional value.

Measuring productivity in hours is a relic of a past labor era. And most workers have little incentive to improve output when they aren’t paid for it.

If we had quiet quitting during the pandemic where jobs could be done in minimal ways without getting fired, in this new artificial intelligence roll out we see another type of value capture mismatch between input labor and firm.

We are seeing what Fabian Steltzer calls Dark leisure. Others call it shadow user innovation.

Innovation happening through employee adoption of new technologies that is opaque to management doesn’t get counted and workers are reticent to be transparent.

the reason ppl hide their AI use isn’t that they’re being shamed, it’s that the time-based labor compensation model does not provide economic incentives to pass on productivity gains to the wider org

so productivity gains instead get transformed to “dark leisure”

Fabian Steltzer

Anthropic released a study on the supposed stigma attached to using artificial intelligence at work. Humans are already reacting to artificial intelligence as if it were an existential threat.

Except it’s been generally existentially freeing up to this point. Anyone who has used commercial large language models on healthcare can attest to that. So why are hiding its use?

Even coders are doing it. And who can blame them. It’s a lot less fun for some folks to coordinate a swarm of agents than it is to write code for a living. If you wanted to be a product manager, well you’d already be one.

The boss makes a dollar and I make a dime so that’s why I prompt on the company dime!

We are seeing the early artificial intelligence era take off collide with industrial-era systems of management that are no longer relevant in age of increasing complexity.

We’re putting intelligence into systems designed to measure hours and surprised when there is a misalignment. A Twitter mutual has a theory of consciousness systems they believe makes this is a form of time violence.

Human beings can tolerate NP hard moments of complexity, but cannot survive continuous low-grade complexity

The gap between human adaptability and systemic inertia is now wide enough to generate an entirely new form of harm: time violence

– Idea Nexus Ventures

We just cannot keep up with the varieties and types of complexities that are arising, so any advantage that can be used is being used. And you’d want to hide that advantage as long as you can. Sharing it has no rational basis. I find that disappointing.

I’d rather we not vice signal artificial intelligence as it only harms us. The value capture won’t always match up, but the gains to be made are worth having so keep using it where it works for you.

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Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1803 and Anemoia

You know I am old as I just don’t consume or create short form video content. Every new trend that filters to me on Twitter or on my reader feeds presents as sadness to me. I don’t fully understand them and probably never will.

The newest TikTok trend involves Zoomers pretending to be happy millennials in 2012 Williamsburg Brooklyn. They romanticize millennial optimism as unpolished and carefree for some sort of shared but unreal nostalgia for pre-gentrification Brooklyn.

I left Williamsburg in 2010 for Manhattan’s Chinatown as even the south side past the JMZ had become too expensive. The loft I shared above Future Perfect on North 8th and Berry was getting expensive on just the other side of the Great Recession. It was a loud place to live and a lot of fun but I needed a lease with my name on it and prime Williamsburg wasn’t it in 2012.

I wasn’t in a position by 2012 to buy an apartment but neither did I have any debt. So I’m sure that made me better off than the Zoomers coveting my life just before New York would go ZIRP. Not making a fortune wasn’t too bad when you could still enjoy a lot of hipster consumer choices.

You can’t blame the Zoomers for feeling like today’s economic volatility and social fragmentation makes our “before times” life look relatively utopian.

Michael Milaflora brought to my attention Gen Z’s “anemoia” which is a broader trend. A 2023 study in Emotion journal found 68% of young adults report nostalgia for past decades they didn’t live, linked to rising anxiety levels post-pandemic.

I’ve previously enjoyed when my own past lifestyles are the subject of nostalgia rehashes on social media. Now I think worried as no one should be too obsessed with the past. Especially not the young.