Tag: Writing

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Emotional Work

Day 1700 and The Passage Become Who You Are

I have been writing every single day for seventeen hundred days. 1700 days is approximately 4.66 years or 4 years and 7ish months. Not bad right?

This is quite a bit longer than I anticipated when I first began writing daily with the relatively modest ambition to write once a day for a month.

I had done daily journaling in private for ten days and was interested in seeing if I could write in public every day for some period.

I wanted to create to synthesize what I consumed across the media landscape as I tried to make sense of a world deep in the throes of Covid.

This experiment was my second sustained blogging project as I had kept a WordPress blog in the glory years of 2005-2008 or so. Other social media was easier but I’d always liked the format of public long form writing.

I had a secret silent ambition to take the daily habit to one year. It seemed doable. I fantasized about making it to 1000 days, even from the start, but that seemed bigger and more likely to fail. But if Scheherazade could make it to One Thousand and One Nights maybe I could as well?

I set out with realistic expectations but big ambitions. And now here on a random August Wednesday I am deep into the depths of a daily habit that shows no sign of stopping.

I nurtured my early ambition by saying I’d take it one day at a time, while never pressuring myself into achieving it. A journey of a thousand miles (or in my case days) starts with a single step.

I don’t care for pressure. I never have. I believe those who are truly ambitious about themselves set their own standards. You make your own life.

I will do things in my own time and at my own pace. I have never been a quitter so it’s never been a problem that I go at my own pace. Life is about results not effort.

My tenacity remains a force in my life because I am comfortable tending to my will daily. We only make progress by nurturing the seed of a thing.

Not every day is a good day. We don’t always win. I have many days where I lose. But as Allen Iverson said “it’s practice” and you never miss practice. And practice adds up. I’ve done amazing things in the last almost half decade.

I hope that this aspect of my character is as clear to others as it is to me. If I sent out on a journey I will do what I can to make it. If I fail (and I might) it is because I couldn’t.

Maybe the timing isn’t always right or my mind or body isn’t right or the market isn’t right or I am not right. Full stop. But I’ll never let myself fail because I didn’t make an honest effort. And you make the effort every single day.

Categories
Culture

Day 1695 and Only Knowing The Now

I let myself be swept into a rolling video scroll on Twitter accidentally today. You may know the awful dark pattern that occurs when you choose to watch a video posted by a mutual in the For You flow. It then sends you down a scroll of video content chosen by algorithm.

Typically it’s dross and I’m sure the account meant to show this particular video to me for nefarious theory of mind reasons but I found it enlightening.

I was sent to young African woman breaking down an epistemology of time in African religion and philosophy by Kenyan scholar and Anglican priest John Mbiti.

John Mbiti’s philosophy of time presents a distinctive African conception of temporality that fundamentally differs from Western linear time concepts…Mbiti argues that African time is two-dimensional, consisting only of the past and present, with virtually no future. – Perplexity Synopsis

Only present entities exist, while past and future things do not. Crimping from video and Wikipedia.

A screenshot of the video

“Sasa (the now) and Zamani (the endless past) are the central concepts in Mbiti’s temporal framework.”

Being western Protestant myself, lacking an epistemology or ontology for a “real” future that arrives feels sad to me, even if rationally I know I am only ever experiencing the now.

You can say I only “know” the “now” as it’s all I’ve ever experienced. We call this theory of time Presentism.

Sasa is now in Swahili. Which took me to a funny place as I thought of the use of sasa in the sci fi series The Expanses’s invented Belter creole for “to know.”

One can easily argue that all we know is the now which makes “sasa” as “now” and “sasa” “to know” easily bridged. I wonder if the linguist who created the patois knew this. Probably.

Sasa makes a mathematical sense to me as I live in 3 dimensions but know the 4th dimension of time to exist but only “know” time as “now”

Nevertheless I myself am quite interested in the future arriving. So I have put together a ham fisted Belter sentence of my own as I wish for everyone to experience more future time

“Mi sasa da future gonya kome. Me kopeng wedi da way long day”

Categories
Internet Culture Reading

Day 1676 and Having Public Fun in the Artificial Intelligence Era

It’s August and vacation season is in full swing. It seems as if all of Europe is off for the month. For the Americans who work around the school year, it’s their time for a week off as well.

We rarely vacation for an extended period and when we do it’s not generally during high season. Off season is where it’s at in my mind. But sometimes you need some fun when it’s been a hard time.

I’m struggling with how much I put online about my comings and goings and when I do it. Being careful used to mean not letting thieves know if you weren’t home but now the world is a mix of digital and physical security layered over artificial intelligence tools that can pinpoint you easily.

Opsec isn’t a thing elder millennials considered too carefully with digital identities in the early years of the internet but everything is changing. Dead internet theory may become true as the internet of bots begin.

I don’t intend to cede the digital commons though. I want my written voice to be integrated into the vast data troves that shift the records and is woven into the understanding of artificial intelligence and machine learning models.

The more these modalities of information storage and retrieval impact our human minds, the more necessary it is write oneself into “the Akashic records” that form our digitalization of information. Humans used to read and write machines but now machines and their media are just as likely to read and write our minds

So what are we to do about living in public? Humans are mortal but records of our world have a shot at reaching the future and shaping understanding.

Blogging has ended up being one of the best mediums for being scraped, organized and cited well by current artificial intelligence.

Open graph protocols, structured metadata structure, canonical URLS, tagging and linking, and authorial data and publication time are all part of a digital commons that have a distinct advantage over other closed garden content repositories for artificial intelligence. Being legible to the machines is now as important than being legible to each other.

So having your fun in public and making it accessible just might be one of the most important things you can do to be a part of the record of our world. It’s just a terrifying prospect to be so easily seen.

Categories
Media

Day 1671 and Warenästhetik

I have a favorite book store in San Francisco is called City Lights. It’s an old Beat bookstore that carried the city through its left wing era.

They have a section called commodity aesthetics from which I treat myself to a fresh book from every time I visit San Francisco. I’ve got quite a collection from the habit.

Having spent the requisite time with the western cannon, I enjoy dabbling in critical theory and its decedents like commodity aesthetics as an adult.

The Frankfurt School has direct line from Horkheimer to the founder of commodity aesthetics Wolfgang Fritz Haug. Warenästhetik, in German, is the process of aestheticising products we make and consume.

Marxists go on about the seduction and manipulation of consumers in order to reinforce capitalist systems but it’s hard to ignore the impact of the field on what we make, use, and sell.

The wider world of why and what commodify is ever changing even as it recycles the same archetypes and patterns over and over again. See the Sydney Sweeney’s “good jeans” remake of Brooke Shields infamous Calvin Klein advertisement.

It’s amusing to me that the Marxist have put in more effort to understanding the nuts and bolts of making and selling desirable goods than capitalists do. Maybe that’s what they mean by praxis? The criticism and the practice come together in one bookshelf in a basement of a bookstore in North Beach.

Categories
Chronic Disease

Day 1670 and Bile and Spleen

I am, as per usual, having a shitty summer. Once we cross the Solstice it’s me hanging on to sanity by ny nails praying for the return of winter.

I can’t recall a time I had a good summer except perhaps jn the hazy memories of my early twenties when I was probably too stupid, traumatized and physically healthy to know one way or another.

Now I’m smarter, sicker and I’ve done enough emotional work to actually feel it all. Don’t knock that desensitized disassociation kids you may miss it when it’s gone.

Maybe it’s simpler than that. Back in the aughts & the briefly booming Obama ZIRP teens, our global climate weirding just had not hit New York City hard enough for me to have really bad summers.

I always had a window air conditioner and enough cash to run it. Either way, a summer where I wasn’t miserable isn’t a memory I cant access now. It’s sealed off under the pain of the now. The past being a foreign country and all.

I’ve certainly not had a good summer in the last decade. I’ve got daily tracking data from the last six years of my life and the summer is just an unending torment of bad biometrics, pain, cabin fever and seasonal affective disorder. Bet you didn’t know it has a summer variant did you?

I’m always sicker when it’s hot. So it’s just bile and spleen for now. Almost enough to make me want to toss the entire daily logging project till the torment lifts. Since I won’t do that I’ll pour the misery on page.

I can’t wait to see what August has in store for me. My cold comfort is knowing I will be enjoying a long week of financial news. At least that you can do indoors locked up under the air conditioning.

Categories
Medical

Day 1661 and Please Let This Be Over Soon

I am hanging onto my sanity by a thread as I round the corner of a surgery I did not expect. Well, I’m eight days out from it, so slightly more than a week.

I’m hoping I start to feel gets better soon. It’s my first day without antibiotics and I am already certain I shouldn’t be off them. As horrific as the side effects of Cipro may be, my immune suppression on Bimzelx is leaving me shockingly open to skin infections.

I’m terrified of MRSA at this point. I was taking doxycycline for another skin infection when the cyst went around the bend to “septic fears” on me so I’m a bit twitchy about the entire situation.

The prior IL-17 seemed to strike a fine balance on suppression and capacity to fight off infections. Now my biometrics are better but I’m constantly fighting off chaos with the meiborn gland nonsense and now buried cysts from sideways hairs fracking my dermis.

Maybe I’ll turn a corner and have some better writing ahead of me soon. Until that happens please forgive my poor blogging and missed emails. At this point the singularity could arrive and I’d miss it like a character in Left Behind. I’ll probably miss the rapture at this rate.

Categories
Community Culture

Day 1641 and Honor

The good vibes of my weekend have washed out on the tides as I consider a frustrating non-interaction that has grown into anger in my heart as rapidly as a wheatgrass seed grows in an Easter basket.

I am considering the question of honor in the context of closed communities and events. If you go looking, the cat is out of the bag on where I was and with whom, but I don’t yet have personal permission to use a name, so I’ll keep this brief.

I’m in my Worf era

I’ve been called many names in my time and plenty of them have not been laudatory. Dirty shiksa, stupid cunt, and mostly recently, demonic. Everyone being entitled to their opinion, I don’t generally ask for apologies. I do ask that you say it to my face though.

I am a shiksa, certainly “see you next Tuesday” from time to time, but I remain skeptical that I am possessed by anything from Hades or other Lovecraftian horror from the beyond.

But so long as you use my name in the process of insulting my honor, I only request you look me in the eyes while you do it. I can take it. I stand by who I am and what I say.

So I can’t shake the feeling that I was deliberately dishonored by the speaker. And I am actually angry now. I am used to the insult throwing and name calling of Internet living, indeed I thrive in it. I am not accustomed to aspersions by celebrities as I don’t matter all that much. And I certainly didn’t expect it in a small private group.

I fight in that arena under my own banner. I take those punches under my own name. I won’t lie, someone of stature being so upset as to call me evil without felt good at first (how nice to be noticed) and slowly curdled into a fury over the disrespect.

Maybe it’s because I was one of the few women speaking. It was only after much effort he agreed to speak with my male co-speaker and not me (I’d already left). Maybe it was because after multiple attempts at engagement I was refused time and again. Maybe it’s because his gaze remained staunchly averted. Whatever triggered it has now turned to fiery anger.

I think it’s a bitch move to drop bombs and then runaway like a kicked cur when the beast stirs. And I am quite wide awake now.

I’m the alien in this scenario
Categories
Reading

Day 1631 and Picky Picky

I loved the Ramona Quimby books as a child. A normal but mischievous girl in a working class family was very relatable. As an eight year old I was neither shiny or well behaved.

I’ve avoided any contact with film or television adaptions so Beverly Cleary’s original work remains in my imagination. I don’t need things spiffed up and polished into Selena Gomez Disney programming. I prefer to see Ramona as just a normal kid.

Ramona Quimby Age 8 by Beverly Cleary

And normal kids have normal problems. Ramona was a pest, so much of the series involved seeing things from her vantage as child struggling to consider cause and effect in her interpersonal skills.

I remember her having anxiety about this maturation process. Quimby family had a yellow cat they called Picky-Picky. One of her fears was that perhaps own behavior, which could always control, was the reason the cat just wouldn’t eat his food. If she was a good girl would Picky Picky be, well, less picky?

How much of the anxiety from our younger years sounds as silly to your now adult self?

I think back on my own impressions of my behavior as a child and I wonder if I had been “better” would my life have been better?

I was slowly smoothed and sanded from pest to well behaved. But it didn’t change anyone around me.

I don’t know if the worry about the picky cat is merely “head cannon” for me or a point Cleary meant to get across on the values of boundaries and coexistence.

Picky Picky probably would have still been picky. And not all problems of the Quimby family were Ramona’s fault. Least of all the cat’s issues with eating.

Categories
Culture Emotional Work

Day 1614 and Updating Our Hyperparameters

The worst part of change is figuring out what you need to let go of in order to achieve it. Cate Hall (whose writing I admire) has a timely essay on the topic.

Modern life is mess of conflicting and changing realities to which we are more or less poorly adapting ourselves. Learning is hard.

As you might expect from hominids adapted to long extinct physical and chemical environments, the new parameters determining our current physical realities are a challenge for us to update on our own.

Backpropogating a human neural network does not yet have a set of best practices but when it does emerge I’m surely it will be a blogger tying together the layers of training, physical requirements and other weights and cultural measures that improve our learning environment.

Not with me? Google’s attempts to serve AI generated synopses is here to help and their updates might be working as this isn’t bad

Backpropagation is a training algorithm for neural networks, specifically designed to optimize the weights within the network by minimizing the difference between predicted and actual outputs. Backpropagation aims to reduce the error between the network’s output and the desired output

In plain English, you learn by making mistakes and correcting them. You do something again with an adjusted technique and when succeed you update your understanding. You reduce your errors by looking back at what you did and changing your future behavior hoping it will succeed. When it does you adjust. You have learned.

Success might change depending on what you are doing and how your environment changes. Some constants remain. How can we look back on the data in our own lives and in our species and use it to improve our lives going forward?

I don’t know exactly how to approach the current moment but I know I’m adjusting to millions of pieces of input daily and I am still frustrated that I don’t always get the outputs I want. The logical next move is to change.

But change what? And how? What will I be leaving behind in that process? How acceptable is it to let go of what we were so sure we knew? Can we convince others of it? Can we adjust the parameters globally so others adjust too? How do we turn the knobs and dials on the systems that we use to learn at network scale?

Categories
Community Internet Culture

Day 1609 and We Train The Future

I’ve been writing about the increasing entropy in our systems for so long that the actual arrival of the chaotic years always felt like an inevitability that would never come. And yet they are here.

The internet is a hostile place as ideas war and humanity struggles with the weight of a fully networked world. I feel it in my body. I see the automation of attention grabbing even as the birth of the most powerful tools for control over my information environment have never been more readily available.

I persist in being a public human presence on the internet. I know I am part of the web. We built cyberspace out of a world of special interests and varied incentives and it’s giving us back something much larger than our individual contributions. I think the next stage of networking will offer us much more.

Because of that value of that potential I cannot let myself step back from shaping its form. The new world is trained on those of us who put up what we know, think, feel, and desire to be part of the human experience.

It’s not always a pretty picture but I will not cede this space simply because we have the tools to fill an infinity. I do not have an infinity. And I can hold out for a little bit in that time.