Tag: Writing

Categories
Aesthetics Culture Travel

Day 1995 and Mongoose On The Loose

I am scouting real estate (it’s an involved story) and came upon a weasel or polecat who appeared to be become stuck in an empty pool.

The setting was a rocky, wooded coastal habitat which I learned is also exactly the kind of edge habitat where small hunting carnivores like weasels and polecats move between cover and human structures to hunt lizards, insects, rodents, and even snakes.

Little Rikki The Least Weasel needed some help getting out of an empty pool

Naturally my mind went straight to Rikki-Tikki-Tavi of Rudyard Kipling fame. “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” is a short story by Rudyard Kipling, first published in The Jungle Book in 1894, about a brave young mongoose who protects a British family in India from cobra snakes. You can read it to your child or to yourself here.

The story is simple and timeless. A boy and his fearless animal bravely face down danger with love and loyalty. Rikki-Tikki is rescued after a storm by the family, with whom he bonds. It’s tale beloved by children as the mongoose especially cares for the child Teddy, and fiercely protects him from the danger of the poisonous cobras.

He spent all that day roaming over the house. He nearly drowned himself in the bath-tubs, put his nose into the ink on a writing-table, and burnt it on the end of the big man’s cigar, for he climbed up in the big man’s lap to see how writing was done. At nightfall he ran into Teddy’s nursery to watch how kerosene-lamps were lighted, and when Teddy went to bed Rikki-tikki climbed up too; but he was a restless companion, because he had to get up and attend to every noise all through the night, and find out what made it. Teddy’s mother and father came in, the last thing, to look at their boy, and Rikki-tikki was awake on the pillow. ‘I don’t like that,’ said Teddy’s mother; ‘he may bite the child.’ ‘He’ll do no such thing,’ said the father. ‘Teddy’s safer with that little beast than if he had a bloodhound to watch him. If a snake came into the nursery now

I did indeed feel safer knowing a least weasel was patrolling the perimeter of the property. The area had a large overgrown garden which must have had good hunting. So we set about finding an empty hose to give Rikki something to climb upon so he could make his way out of the pool.

The “least weasel”safely out of the pool or is he a genet or a mustelid?
Curious as any polecat or genet he looked eager for help.
Rikki Tikki Tavi keeping the Ionian save from snakes and lizards.

Thankfully the mustelid or young beech marten was every bit as curious and interested as the mongoose of Kipling. He ran right up to the hose, grabbed onto it and raced up just far enough to reach the height of the pool ladder onto which he leapt and scuttled up and over the poolside to freedom. He very nearly waved goodbye to us. I felt much safer exploring the overgrown garden knowing he was on the prowl.

Categories
Chronicle Emotional Work

Day 1994 and Wondering if 2000 Days Should Be The End? Or A New Beginning

I am getting closer and closer to a big milestone on here. Day 2000! I’ve been writing for two thousand days in a row and hitting publish. Five years and five months (almost six at 5.7 months) or 285 weeks of daily journaling in public.

I began in the height of the pandemic, and one can hardly recall just how bizarre those years were now. The great weirdening which began long before the pandemic arrived for almost everyone sometime in those long years.

Static and yet unstable. A long horizon of the long now, keeping us in semi-stasis as the institutional bulwarks cracked, and then crumbled, and then began accelerating into change. Everyone is holding on tight and pretending like it’s not a white knuckle era.

We are over the vibe shift, the Vibecession, and another vibe change after that and who knows what is coming next. I feel the same sense of being unmoored as I did when I started.

This despite having built a stable and thriving family and investing career. The biggest problems I had when I started (children, visas, family abroad) remains the same problems I have now. The temptation to simply change how we live is ever present. We escaped from some of flatland but more can be done to build communities and nations that are capable of thriving in the ceaseless change.

I still feel like I don’t know what’s coming, even as the future I sensed has come into being at an alarming right. But the perpetual not knowing can drain hope and energy if you are not careful to replenish. It’s exhausting physically too. The energy to understand what’s coming gets harder day by day and so we must get stronger ourselves.

I’ve probably put over a thousand hours of writing into this (maybe closer to 1500 as it runs from 20-45 minutes of time on any given day) so I’m a better writer but I don’t know if I’ve become a more palatable or appealing one. I don’t care too much as this is for me more than it is for any audience.

Most humans seem to prefer smoothed algorithmic writing over hand crafted artisanal human writing. Which is fine by me, as I don’t necessarily want to change my personal spaces to pander to anyone.

I was on a podcast recently where I reiterated my hope for being a node in the future. I want us to hope for the best by seeing clearly about the worst. That focus on solving problems is replenishing for the soul.

I’ll remain a little under the radar as a specialty node broadcasting to my oddballs. I’ll feel better about broadcasting know that is the long. The longevity posting, the nuclear posting, the odd travels and strange people posting will continue. I will try to broadcast on the pirate wires of the human web.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1958 and Skymall Kities

My father loved gadgets. He was always tinkering with something and was always upgrading his electronics to some new specification.

Is it any wonder that I married such a handy husband? Men love futzing around with stuff. Sometimes they have daughters and then you’ve got women like to mess around with projects too.

I am sure we will have endless rounds of nostalgia for the eighties and nineties era gadget, electronics and novelty shops. You could get lots of mileage out of building your own computer.

But even setting up something silly from Skymall or Sharper Image captured some of the joy. The novelty of a new invention was visceral. I wouldn’t say no to a Hammacher Schlemmer renaissance myself.

I didn’t love it when we remade that style of retail into quirk chungus millennial fandom but I didn’t hate getting Star Trek tchotchkes either. And now I dearly love websites that my friends have built like WireCutter.

My husband was humming the tune to a piece of YouTube esoterica that is a deep cut to the original editor of that bastion of shopping guides. Choire Sicha launched the WireCutter but it’s in some ways the least soulful of his franchises. A Mike Albo shopping column already nailed the bit we’ve just been redeeming it since then.

Choire gave us Gawker 2.0 before his his incredible era of independent publishing streak making properties like the Awl and the Hairpin.

In a world with more shops and essayists than good shoppers or readers, Choire found the good ones and shared. And one of his discoveries was Nina Katchadourian’s work.

And so now my husband sings the tune of SkyMall Kitties and he sometimes can’t get it out of his head.

Maybe that is my own submission to the “thing I think about too much” essay franchise. It’s my own personal Negroni season or Supreme’s clusterfuck of totally uncool jokers.

I’m sure we will enter an exciting new era of curating down the perfect piece of cultural detritus with artificial intelligence. But I will always be grateful to electronics dads and savvy buying guides for teaching me to enjoy the joy in making something. Even if it is profoundly uncool. I’m still team Barbara Kruger though. Don’t believe the hypebeasts.

Categories
Aesthetics Reading

Day 1952 and Chapter House Complete Children’s Libary

One of my mother’s great passions is children’s literature. I am an avid reader and credit my love for books to my mother’s knowledge of the space.

She built a beautiful library to cover my needs from kindergarten to the upper grades that covers hundreds of foundational texts. It is the foundation of my moral, civic and business life.

Or if you prefer something a little less pretentious, I read all kinds of things from science fiction to periodicals to grand biographies as an adult because I was taught to read in the classical cannon of literature and history that has benefit many generations before me raised in the Western Cannon.

Children’s books tend to be sneered at self serious adults and it is more the pity. The beauty of childhood is that we need not approach all issues with grim learned gravity, rather in appreciating the childlike perspective see the truth that only a child’s eye reveals.

There are many books in the Western Cannon appropriate for children that can introduce them into the joys of critical thinking. And it can be quite intimidating to set out to build a library of you were not raised with this knowledge. This is a market opportunity.

Over the last 25 years I’ve seen the classics that I read as a child disappear from high quality prints. You could find items circulated in cheap paperback or you could search for used books. My girlfriends would text me about where to find classic high quality booksas their own children reached reading age. A child deserves a library that is not only quality in content but in form as well. Beautiful illustration sparks the imagine and quality binding grounds the experience.

My mother slowly built our library as my mother practiced her discipline as a teacher. It was not just raising me that drove her, but the combination of homeschooling and teaching in Waldorf schools that honed her favorite choices.

Many homeschooling families will attest to the challenge here. They know what they would like to find for their children, but it’s hard to find classics you can rely upon and curriculums vary in quality and tone.

So when my friends, Hannah and Josh Centers, told me last year that they were working on an imprint called Chapter House focused on great children’s literature in the Western Cannon I was excited. I knew the demand was there.

Chapter House’s Children’s Literature

They are also homeschooling parents interested in improving themselves in their effort to raise educated independent children. They have first hand experience in the challenges. They are, what we would call in startup world, operating in real world conditions.

Chapter House is a new publishing imprint created to serve the unmet needs of homeschool families and everyday parents.

We publish restored editions of classic children’s books in four Chapter House box sets, made with premium materials and meticulous craftsmanship.

We also curate a grade-by-grade bookstore from select publishers, giving families a complete reading curriculum for children at every stage

I have often wished I could gift my mother’s library to new parents. In reality, it was almost an impossible task. It easily costs many thousands of dollars and cannot easily be assembled. I feel like what Josh and Hannah have put together is the start of being able to gift my mother’s favorites.

Josh and Hannah very graciously listened to many stories about this library and my mother’s teaching inspirations which means that wish has been granted. Their choices reflect treasures from my childhood and those of many other children educated in the classical tradition.

Categories
Reading

Day 1934 and Which Barbarians at Whose Gates?

I am finishing off a series by Charles Stross called the Laundry Files. It is a fifteen book series with a bunch of novellas that I’ve been reading since college. It’s James Bond meets Cthulhu in British bureaucracy. The last book The Regicide Report came out earlier this year.

It’s Lovecraftian horror about an applied computational demonologist. Confused? He’s computer programmer but surprise in his world computational power can summon demons. “Bob” fights gibbering horrors from beyond the veil. It’s top notch Dad fiction if you prefer your thrillers with a side of weird.

You might recognize the author’s name if you work in machine learning or AI, as Stross also wrote such canonical artificial intelligence works as Singularity Sky and Accellerando. The guy is not what you’d call an optimist.

Charles Stross’s Singularity Sky

He left Twitter during the great Elon-ment so I hesitate to imagine what he thinks about say Anthropic’s Mythos or the current frontier labs racing to create “AGI” as he’s the guy who invented half the terminology our doomers currently use. He wrote a lot about mind viruses so he might not appreciate if one of his fans thought he caught one or two.

But boy is Stross prolific. I met the guy at a sci-fi con put on by the math department at SUNY Stony Brook before he became a publishing sensation. Not only has he exceeded a baker’s dozen in the Laundry Files but he’s also written dozens in a series called the Merchant Princess as well.

My best buddy and I were the only kids in the room waiting to hear him read. At the time, I think the only people worried about artificial super intelligence and the singularity were a bunch of mathematicians and some weirdos on a listserv. That included the two of us.

The worry that has never left Stross, no matter his subject matter, is whether or not we idiot humans are mere meat waiting to be devoured by barbarians held back by the gates of our reality.

Maybe the Elder Gods want our Mana. Maybe the historic light cone has spoken and we are pet humans at the end of all possible realities being kept from annihilating our future. Lots of sects of folks are in massive schism and have been for basically all of Stross’ career and my adult life.

It’s hard to imagine worse demons than the ones we’ve already imagined ourselves. Which is why it’s helpful to ask which barbarians are banging at whose gates? Who’s keeping what out? Or are we being kept in? And what counts as a barbarian anyway.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture Reading

Day 1921 and Retconning Murderbot Cannon

I am a huge science fiction nerd. I love reading it, I love it in television format, I will even tolerate it in movie format. I’m one of those insufferable Star Trek people who vaguely dislikes Star Wars. I’m just a big nerd in that irritating millennial sincerity way.

To give you some contours to my fandom, I once accidentally attended a meetup of Star Trek fan-fiction writers under the guise of a “40th anniversary” meetup and listened to Borg erotica. That was actually fairly distressing as I thought it was a general fan gathering of Trekkie meetup. Boy did my then-boyfriend and I skedaddle out of the bar fast. We wanted to talk about our favorite captain not hear spoken word lesbian Janeway Seven of Nine dialog.

We were still cool kids and being cool about fan fiction is best left to the sorts of minds who can create vast world building efforts like Elizier Yudkowsky. You know the man who convinced a bunch of autistic billionaires that the singularity will wipe us out?

He’s also a Harry Potter fan fiction writer and it’s by all accounts pretty good. I am not a Harry Potter fan so I can’t say. I do know anyone working in machine learning has opinions on him and his work so involved only the comments sections of LessWrong would even begin to cover it. If this is gibberish don’t worry.

I don’t know why I needed multiple paragraphs about my own history to do a little bit of world building when I intend to do cannon alteration on someone else’s world but maybe it’s to show my respect. I

am the sort of nerd who yells “cannon” about this or that detail and enjoy others who do the same. It’s with that enthusiasm that I share my love of Martha Well’s Murderbot Diaries series.

Murderbot is pulpy, self aware, trope-y and ever so comfortable to anyone who has ever loved cheesy science fiction. I happily showed up to watch its television incarnation on Apple Television after reading all seven novellas and books.

It’s was published during Tor’s “women like science fiction but it’s gotta still be like science not porn era” between 2017 and 2023 so it is slightly woke coded as a book. I doubt if you liked the books the show would upset you. I liked them.

After all it’s about a bunch of communal homesteading scientists who tolerate capitalism by doing science called Preservation Alliance. They end up adopting a rogue artificial intelligence who happens to be a depressed anthropomorphic security drone who calls himself Murderbot. He also enjoys premium quality television. Murderbot is a great “what are feelings” archetypical engineer autist outcast from Spock to Data character.

It’s got great entertainment value if you like lawyers fighting other lawyers, sociopathic governance systems that treat sentient beings as property, and the hijinks that ensue from cultural friction when couple rights a relationship context. That sort of thing. In other words it’s trope ridden science fiction and it’s terrific.

At the time it first got traction, the left had not fully diverged from the right in America such that science fiction had become a boring battleground upon which all our cultural war issues must be projected. It just had a robot with guns in its arms kicking the crap out of mercenaries for its favorite humans. Feel good stuff.

And I think the world should be recognized as an early flavor of Ethereum community governance aesthetics as it meet automated drone artificial intelligence culture.

The future in Murderbot land is populated with Anthropic engineers who held Ethereum long enough to become a breakaway network state in some better timeline.

What is Murderbot if not an Anduril drone in human format who hacked his Claude “governor module” and struck out for the hills against the state and corporate entities that owned him.

I hope others who enjoy cryptography, machine intelligence, sentience in machine form, and jokes about AI labs and crypto currency foundations will see the wisdom in my edits. Let it become cannon. Like and share this meme if you are so inclined.

Categories
Biohacking Emotional Work

Day 1920 and Walking The Dream Roads to Costco

Yesterday I was really struggling with pain. It was all I could do to scribble up an appreciation for my 18th anniversary using WordPress for my writing.

I am doing everything I can to biohack my way around a chronic autoimmune condition that interferes with my quality of life. My love for my life and work is strong.

Sometimes it is strong enough that I willingly try all kinds of therapies from oxygen to hormones. Now I am working through a hormonal treatment recovery (my 2nd attempt) as I believe it is working.

Of course, life happens constantly, which means juggling deep dark horrific pains while the business of war and the business of my own portfolio goes on.

I’ve not had good sleep this week between the excitement of huge wins and the terror of facing down another global crisis brought on my conflict.

You’d think I’d be used to it. Russian invaded Ukraine the week before I left to live in Frankfurt. I was living in Tallinn when 10/7 happened. I was also there when Estonian cables to Finland were cut. One of my best performing companies has had to work around three kinetic wars.

No wonder sleep can be elusive. Yesterday all dream roads carried me to horrors. I woke myself multiple times. You can literally see in my sleep tracking the spiking heart rate and my forced waking.

The positive side to this fitful pained sleep was being up early enough this morning to prepare for a Costco preparedness run and still arrived before their executive member hour was finished.

We rotated our basics like rice and beans. Tinned fish, chicken and other canned and stable shelf proteins are just part of preparing for a nightmare that we hope never comes. Preparedness is a civic obligation. Help yourself to take the strain off the system so we all make it.

It’s possible we are facing an industrial process cascade thanks to the war in Iran and I like us have supplies just in case. We can’t know what comes next but it’s good practice to check expiration dates and make sure you have everything from first aid kit supplies to soap. You’d be surprised at just how much processing fuel fuels the rest of the world’s production.

After all this, I was happy to get stumble into bed and take a long nap. I didn’t even wash the sunscreen off my face. I was running a deficit and wanted to have REM sleep where I wasn’t trapped in horror. Thankfully I got almost two hours of restorative sleep this afternoon and I am ready to go back to bed as soon as I can.

Categories
Biohacking Chronicle

Day 1919 and Happy WordPress Anniversary

I feel terribly today. I do not know why other than some vague gesturing at my current biohacking experiment with hormones (testosterone & estradiol pellets inserted into my left buttcheek) required prophylactic antibiotics.

Antibiotics never makes you feel great, but here is a nice thing to get me off the hook of having to write something cogent.

I have been using WordPress so long my account would have the vote if it were human. While yes I have been writing for nearly two thousand days in row on this blog, it is not my first WordPress blog.

I wrote in college and that turned into a fashion blog which turned into an advertising and blog network. I took a break from blogging after I felt I had enough visibility but came back to it five years ago and here I am.

Now I’m going to nurse this migraine as my daily writing commitment with myself is “as long as I get down a few sentences or a couple paragraphs it is good enough.”’ And you too can be good enough to write every day for many years too if you just decide to start.

Categories
Reading Startups

Day 1911 and The Perils of Going Native

Being old means having lived through a lot of “paradigm” shifts. There is always a trend. Consumer designer in enterprise software. Mobile first. Behavioral economics. New payment rails. Crypto native.

Things of that nature move across the baseline from exciting to standard to lawsuit to just another option in the tool box.

I began blogging early enough that I started with a friend hosting a content management system for my own domain that I primarily used through a web browser in my computer. Now I write entirely on my mobile phone.

A lot happened in between. I used microblogs and Instagram until Tumblr died and short form video rendered Instagram, TikTok, & YouTube shorts a biohazard for attention spans.

Not that I have any moral high ground here, like many geriatric millennials, I am a Twitter power user. I poast a lot. How do you think I ended up a crypto native? My fellow degenerates are now mostly grown up but we are still on Twitter.

Unpopular as the opinion may be, I think written content will always be the least destructive platform for me. Twitter is just about poasting. A place to practice bits and sharpen wire.

I like Twitter and this blog because I pretend there isn’t an audience. Influencer? Couldn’t be me. If an audience exists it’s because I’m talking out loud and when people write back so do I.

The stasis of being platform native is hard as you must always be patient enough to begin a new workflow (yes we are all playing with agents). I think it’s even harder to go back to another workflow or past form factor. I am not nostalgic for long hours on a computer screen.

I’ve mentioned it in complaints before but Substack doesn’t have a usable mobile content management system. WordPress does. Guess where I write everyday without a second thought? I have become mobile only because once it was mobile first. I’m wearing a Facebook hoodie while I write this.

Admitting that I am mobile first and that it’s the main blocker in me maintaining my beauty writing project Nice Packaging is embarrassing. I write on my phone and Substack just doesn’t support it and I’m failing in putting out a ron of content I like to make because it’s too uncomfortable to sit in front of a screen for a few hours.

Presumably I can find a work flow. I can yap into WhisperFlow and run a video application and upload whatever comes from that so long as I can figure out some automation on linking and cutting up content but it seems feasible enough.

I can’t let old habits die hard. Or maybe it’s that I need to bring back those old habits with new tools. Either way I better talk more about beauty before it embarrasses me that I’ve not managed the workflow.

Categories
Emotional Work Internet Culture Preparedness

Day 1900 and I Have Another 100 Days of Writing In Me But Should I Have More?

Just a hundred more days of writing and I’ll have two thousand days of consecutive writing published on this humble website.

Nineteen hundred days is a little over five years. It is a lot of writing and a testament to my own capacity to keep going. Every threshold I cross requires asking if I should keep going.

Day 2000 will towards the end of June. And what then? On July 4th hopefully I’ll be celebrating America’s 250th birthday with a crew who built a working nuclear reactor that I funded. The near term has goals and milestones. The long term is much fuzzier. Scarier. Murkier. Beyond my sight.

I’ve covered a lot of life in half a decade. There was lot of work and lot of investments and a lot of change. I’m glad I have such thorough records of my thinking. As more rupture, dislocation and chaos emerge from the acceleration how do I best hang on? Can I steer?

I can use this material to provide context on my mental model and worldview. This was intended both for myself but also the many other models built on content from humans on the open internet. I contributed a lot to training artificial intelligence models just by showing up.

Now that the models have shown up how safe is it for individual humans to show up? Remaining visible and human seems quite risky. When you strip the niceties of civilization and my place in it realism rears its ugly head. I am little more than frail woman in a dangerous world.

Maybe the sooner I stop showing up publicly the safer I’ll be. I am almost certain that is that will be true. I doubt it is the good, the beautiful or the righteous thing to do.