TWENTY-FIRST POST

August 3, 2026 · 3:53 PM

I, once again, have had a radicalizing experience with the current American healthcare system.

After posting the insane update below, I realized I was actually not doing very good at all. I underestimated what it means to be microwaved.

Sunday afternoon, I hit my eye.

Monday morning, I woke up and threw up for an hour. This seemed less than optimal. I was vaguely concerned, but throwing up is not all that unusual for me, so I tried to get through my day.

I went to meet a friend in town at a japanese listening room in Chinatown. They accidentally took the train to Brooklyn, so I went to a new coffee shop while I waited for them to get back. I bought some interesting magazines from the Iconic Magazine Store. I had a little hojicha latte. We caught up. We went shopping. I called in backup, and my beautiful sweet french friend came and we spent a few hours giggling in dressing rooms. Pretty light stuff. My head started hurting and I felt kinda spacey, so I went home.

I slept for 15 hours.

I woke up Tuesday, and knew I was Not Good. The entire left side of my head was making it pretty hard to ignore how Not Good I was. So I tried to look at a screen, and well, that made it worse. I cancelled my calls, and asked the LLMs for advice.

The LLMs told me to go to a Hospital. I felt like this was overkill. I really didn't want to make a big deal of it. After all, I got hit in the face by a microwave door.

I was literally microwaved, but this feels like a fairly unusual way to actually hurt yourself in a meaningful sense, right? Surely this is something an urgent care can handle.

Various LLMs I consulted told me that if I went to an urgent care, they would likely just send me to a hospital anyway, so I should probably just go to an ER. We met in the middle, and they agreed that the Freestanding Emergency Department in my neighborhood would be a good place to check out.

Okay, fine. I am not a stranger to the hospital. I knew this was going to kill my entire day. I packed up a big bag. Honestly, I was pretty pissed off and resentful that I even had to do this, but I had literally all of the hallmark symptoms of see a doctor immediately: I hit my head, threw up a bunch, couldn't really think straight, and I had a crazy headache. It was enough that I knew if I didn't go, I'd probably convince myself I had a brain bleed, and frankly I don't need that anxiety this week.

I took an Uber there. It dropped me off in the wrong location.

Stunned, dizzy, I walk the two blocks and accidentally walk through the ambulance drop off area. Yeah, doing great.

I explain to the front desk my problem. She gives me a bracelet and admits me basically immediately. By "admits", I mean she tells me to go sit on the other side of a vibecoded-ass wall in the waiting room. Sure.

I sit for a while. I notice I definitely cannot look at a screen for more than 3 minutes without needles forming in my skull. I have a weirder amount of tracers than normal. At least they're fun to play with, I guess.

I space out. They take my blood pressure, do some vitals, ask me the same questions again, and then put me back in the weird cordoned off section of the waiting room.

20-ish minutes later, they call me back again. This time is different.

They walk me into what is I guess a triage-place. There is much beeping from many different machines. It is very bright. The young child next to me is being so brave and having his blood drawn. A man is sleeping in a bed behind a curtain that doesn't actually hide him at all. There are six very orthodox jews next to me with a representative from a Hatzolah. He has a little badge that says so and he seems to be the only competent person in the entire place.

Someone appears with an iPad. Registration, I guess. I'm trying my hardest not to throw up again. The beeping is so, so loud, and so discordant.

He asks me to fill out a form, and tells me he'll be back to get it from me.

I accidentally tap one section. It wants a phone number. I try deleting everything. It won't let me submit the form. I try entering (000)-000-0000. It won't let me submit the form. I try (123) 456-7890. It won't let me submit the form. I try entering my own phone number. It won't let me submit the form. I try every combination of thing I can think of. It won't let me submit the form.

I look around and realize I am on the verge of Freaking The Fuck Out.

Actually, I kind of do Freak the Fuck Out. Hoodie over my head, I curl up into the world's smallest ball, gripping the sides of my chair like I might die.

A policeman looks at me with vauge disinterest and then goes back to watching the sleeping man. I try not to cry.

Finally, the same guy comes back. He asks if I have any problems. I say yeah, it's really fucking loud in here, it's really bright, can someone please give me something for my headache? oh and I can't complete the form.

He takes it from me, fiddles for a bit, and then submits it. He tells me there is nowhere else for me to go, but he'll try to find something.

A nurse comes by some time later. He hands me two tylenol. I am certain they will cost me $650. I take them anyway. I request again, please, there are five different machines beeping and I think I am going to die, is there anywhere else I can sit?

He tells me I was "fast-tracked" or something but that he can see, and takes me back into the waiting room where I was.

Fine.

That's pretty loud too, but it's emptier, and there are not six competing beeping machines everyone seems to just ignore, so I deal with it.

They call me back again, and put me in the same chair. The doctor comes by. She asks me about forty times what I mean by I hit myself in the face with a microwave. I understand she has to do this, but she does not seem to take me very seriously. She runs me through some test where I have to touch my nose, then follow her finger, and then touch her finger. I do it but not very well. She asks me to rub one foot down the side of my other shin. I do that, and it's harder than I expected. She tells me to do the other side, and I struggle similarly.

Well, she says. You have a concussion, but I don't think you have a brain bleed, so you're good to leave. Come back if it gets worse.

What? I ask. What do you mean? I did exactly what I was supposed to do, you want me to come back again tomorrow when my headache is worse? Why not just give me a CT scan now?

She looks at me funny and tells me I probably don't need it. I ask her what lead her to that conclusion, and then before she can respond, I ask if she wouldn't mind documenting her refusal to make sure my brain isn't bleeding in my chart. You know, just in case.

She tells me she'll put the tests in.

Weird how that works.

They lead me back to the same waiting room. Then they come and get me, and another guy at the same time, and we walk what appears to be the the entire length of the building. They put both of us outside of radiology.

Neither of us speak to each other, though I'm tempted to ask what he's in for.

They bring me in, scan my brain, and then I ask roughly how long the results will take. The lab tech, who is the only person who is nice to me all day, shrugs and says "usually an hour, but if you have mychart, you'll be able to see it sooner."

Then she walks me out to the same waiting room.

I get an email that my mychart email has changed. I try to login. I cannot login. I try resetting various codes, checking all of my inboxes, etc. I never receive any sort of code.

About 20 minutes later, I get a text that my results are in. I click the link, and I am yet again prompted to login. I try to login. I cannot login. I try resetting various codes, checking all of my inboxes, etc. I never receive any sort of code. I try resetting my password. It does not work. I consult the LLMs, and their solutions do not work either. I briefly consider acts of violence.

My head starts hurting too bad, so I figure if it's bad, they'll just come get me. If my brain was bleeding, surely they would act with some sort of quickness. Probably.

Another 40 minutes go by.

I get another text that implies I have been discharged, and acts as if I have agreed to whatever has happened. I sort of assume this means my brain is OK, but I am a little confused at being discharged without being spoken to at all.

I approach the front desk to ask what's going on, and they actually yell at me to sit back down. They say that the doctor will be with me shortly. They do not seem to understand why I am confused.

I sit back down, beaten. I am a lump. I am a shell. I am made of head pain and only head pain. I simply exist.

The front desk bitch starts actively complaining to her coworker, like I'm not sitting right there. She says she hates this system, because doctors put the results in, and patients get it, and expect to be seen immediately. The guy working with her says something along the lines of agreeing with her, and I realize they're actually just still talking about me.

I, concussed and pretty pissed off at this point, cannot take it anymore.

"I get that that sucks, but that's not what happened to me" I say. Before either of them can speak, I get even more pissed off, and tell them that MY text message was not that my results were in, I already got that one, but that it was discharging me, and I had not been seen by anyone to be discharged in the first place.

They both go quiet, and look at each other. Then, the guy goes "that is weird. The doctor should be here shortly." and I realize that I hate them, like truly hate them, but that it doesn't matter at all.

A few moments later, a nurse comes out with paperwork. He hands me paperwork that says on the top left that my diagnosis is a concussion. The paperwork also contains the number for a concussion center. The paperwork behind the front page appears to be about how to take care of a concussion, but I can't really read it.

The nurse then tells me I do not have a concussion today, and that I am good to go.

I tell him I do not understand. The doctor told me I did have a concussion, and if I do not have a concussion, why are you giving me paperwork about having a concussion? This is all very confusing for someone with a concussion.

He asks me if I'd like to talk to the doctor again. I waffle for a second, and tell him that she didn't take me seriously before, but that I would like to know if I have a concussion or not, so yes please.

He disappears. I stand there with my paperwork that says I have a concussion.

He comes back five minutes later and pulls me into a side room where he is doing some sort of paperwork, and apologizes. He tells me that I do not have a brain bleed, but that I do have a concussion.

I am a little confused at the entire thing, and say okay... so what do I do for a concussion? I have never had one before.

He tells me they don't "do that" here, and that I have to call the NYU concussion center. I tell him I don't understand, and he says that this establishment only handles emergency room stuff like making sure my brain isn't bleeding, and that the concussion people can help me.

I tell him this is very confusing for someone with a concussion, and he says the people on the paperwork can help me. I don't really feel like he understands what a concussion is, but that I've already been here for two and a half hours, and if I don't leave, I might actually die.

He escorts me back out to the lobby, and the rude front desk receptionists tell me I that I am free to leave.

I walk out. It is sort of raining. I have a very big bag with me. I walk home. I tell everyone I can think of that I have a concussion and to please give me some space, time, and understanding.

I tell my mom I have a concussion. I don't think she understands what a concussion is, because over the next four days, she sends me a lot of texts in a row about things like crafts. It hurts my head every time I have to open a text, but I have no idea if any of them are important, or the ones where she's checking on me, and I should probably respond to that. To be honest, I don't really know if I understand what a concussion is.

I straight up don't remember Wednesday. It is gone. The next few days are episodically good, and sometimes a little bad. I have a really nice Friday night but I probably pushed it too far. I am lucid for about four hours on Saturday, and for only a few minutes on Sunday.

I read the entirety of Werner Herzog's memoir. He is really crazy. I take a long bath. I eat some char siu. I read a book called Quantum Listening. I start to feel normal again. I get in bed at a reasonable hour.

I am then unable to sleep. It turns out that having a brain injury is a really complicated thing, and one of the things that can happen is that your brain can get sort of "stuck" in the wrong mode. I begin having a panic attack. I am then stuck having a panic attack. Every single thing I have ever said wrong bubbles and explodes through my quicksand of a mind. I have a panic attack in slow-motion. Every obligation, every thing on my plate, every item I still have to do, they all join me in the mud. It's a really weird quagmire of Bad, and I make some weird noises out loud.

My cat comes up and lets me hold her kind of funny. My hips hurt, so I can't lay like I normally do. She lets me hold her in strange and uncomfortable positions, and purrs. She seems like she is trying to transmit calm and peace to me. Eventually, the vibrations do sort of lull me into a soothed state, and I fall asleep.

I wake up today feeling great. I attack the morning viciously. Voraciously. I get through my One Important Meeting. I have a bit of a scramble before it, but the meeting goes better than expected, and I get somewhere usable by the end. I even generate some deliverables, and all seems better.

My battery is rapidly depleting, and I recognize that I must take it slower. I simply cannot help that words only pour out of me while I am looking at screens. I try writing this with my eyes closed. It's okay, but my hands are kind of off on my keyboard for part of it, and I have to redo it.

I imagine what it's like to be blind, and decide I don't like it very much at all.

TWENTIETH POST

July 29, 2026 · 4:39 PM

I hit my head over the weekend.

Rather, a microwave door hit me in the eye. It happened to hit me hard enough that I was pretty woozy for the rest of the day. I woke up the next day throwing up, and had a very strong headache. The headache did not subside over the next day, and thus I found myself in a "Freestanding ER" on Tuesday afternoon.

I do not have a brain bleed. I do, however, have a concussion. I am light and sound sensitive, I am a little more confused than normal, and I can't look at a computer for more than 6-10 minutes before I feel like I am being stabbed behind my left ear.

It's very painful, and as such, I have taken a few days off from writing. I did not take a few days off from life, and there is much to report on.

For example, on Saturday David threw a party. By that I mean that first I went to my friend David's party. Then, I went to a joint different-David-And-also-different-David party at a second location. The protein VC brand or whatever, David, also threw a popop. At this second party, I hung out with my other friend David, and introduced him to yet another friend named David.... and my friend who was there with their boyfriend -- you guessed it -- also named David.

And that's before the concussion!

There are many things I could report on from Saturday: there was ridiculously good salmon (and I'm a salmon hater), people giving me dirty looks that I didn't actually notice but other people did and asked about, staking bags for bags and other various puzzles, an investigative squad dedicated to finding out the truth of something none of us will publicly admit we're even questioning a little bit.

Sunday was a little bit lower key. A friend is leaving for a few months, and we had some orange wine and went for a bike ride in the park. I got back to the house and microwaved myself after this.

I could spend some time naming all the archetypes of type of guy and girl encountered at these two parties, which definitely included various micro-niche internet celebrities, political actors, ex-friends, ex-lovers, ex-friends-avoiding-ex-lovers, bag fiends, psychic women, cryptocurrency brethren who very much so did not understand that seeing me in a different context did not mean we were at a cryptocurrency party, beautiful women of all varieties, friends of friends, a host of people who told me way more information about themselves than they meant to, a girl we totally lied to about my friend having complete memetic and financial control over the color green (you know, like vantablack? it's that but for all greens) and so on.

I'm not going to do that. Instead, I'm going to talk about one specific interaction I had, and a bigger beef I'm kind of just mad at the world about. I have a concussion, so fuck you, I'm writing what I want.

I'll start by saying this: I'm pretty cheery and outgoing IRL. I have been called gregarious, vivacious, bubbly, the life of the party. I'm asked if I do standup by strangers regularly. My job for a while was essentially to party with rich people, so I can make fairly good conversation with just about anyone. It's not hard for me.

I am hypersensitive in almost every dimension you can think of. This is not said as a brag. Not only is it not said as a brag, I am actually a little bit complaining, because I live in New York. Keep that in mind as I describe this next part to you.

My sense of smell is ridiculously overpowered, for most smells. There are certain things (florals, gasoline) that I cannot smell at all. What I can smell, I can smell intensely. I can smell when someone is cutting a tomato or cucumber in the next room. If you're cooking, I can smell specific ingredients inside what's being cooked from two rooms away. I like to play games where I guess, and I am pretty fucking accurate. I am happy that cannabis is legal in New York, because I much prefer the smell of loud to the smell of piss. Especially in the heat, when it turns acrid and steamy.

My hearing is much better than most people's. I am unable to tune this out most of the time. I have to manually filter noises away from my brain. If you make it loud, I will be unable to think. Sometimes, this is an environment I very much so enjoy being in. It's nice to turn my brain off (or lower), and feel music, feel the ambient vibrations of sounds through space, feel the echoes of words off of ceilings. I can hear things bouncing around. I will hear snippets of conversation from much further away than anyone thinks... I hear more secrets, more personal information, more farts, more swallowing, more chewing, and I feel beeps and boops and electronic dinging and car horns and --

You'll notice that I said I can feel a few of the things I have described as sounds. I do hear sounds so intensely that it as if they are physical to me. This extends to my sense of touch as well: I am extremely sensitive to all of it, from the way my clothing rubs against my stomach, to fluctuations in air movement and temperature. I can probably tell if it's going to rain before you can, and it's not because I'm magic, it's because I felt the downdraft and the temperature drop and the humidity change well before you.

Essentially, aside from sight, my entire sensorium is overly sensitive. I am like a highly tuned instrument. For what? I have no idea. But, as someone who has to live in this stinky, heavy cacophony, all the time, I try to find ways to amuse myself. Otherwise, I would live in overstimulated hell. I mean, I really do not get a break from this. I can't say I enjoy living like this a lot of the time, and wish I could filter these things more autonomically.

One thing that brings me a little bit of joy is to interject into conversations as I pass. I don't really mean to join in, I don't mean to do anything but comment on whatever it is two other people are talking about as I walk by them. I could hear them, I can smell them, and honestly, sometimes my comment or joke is really good and I get some laughs and recognition that I am also a human who likes to participate in social interaction.

This Saturday, at David's, I walked by two or three people who were totally fucking blocking the way to the kitchen. There was no real room or quiet way around them, as this is in the middle of a long, narrow hallway. And so as I approached, I started listening to what they were saying, looking for a natural way through.

They were talking about the stairs.

The stairs at David's are honestly a little scary. He's at the top of a walkup, no elevator, and the stairs are steep. Half the reason I do not partake in anything stronger than an edible at David's is that frankly I'm scared of the stairs.

As I passed, they said something, and in order to draw attention to myself, I said the stairs were... "scary!" and I maybe said one full sentence to that regard. My plan worked, they noticed me, and shifted so that I could walk by.

Now, reader. I kept it moving. I walked into the kitchen. I didn't linger, didn't stick around to annoy, just said my little comment and moved on.

And then I heard one of them mumble (quite rudely), sarcastically, and unpleasantly, no hint of joy or whimsy or even niceness in their voice "thank you birb".

Now, I am honestly a little sick of this treatment, so I replied "you're welcome!"

They obviously had not expected me to hear. They even then said "you heard that?" and I went "well how else would I be replying?" and then I finished filling up my cup with water, walked past them, and went back out into the rest of the party.

About 20 minutes later, the tall one came up to where I was talking to some of my other friends. I'm still not sure who this person was, but they approached me a little sheepishly. My friend starts talking to them, shakes their hand, and says "nice to meet you, Jack Antonoff". It's not actually him, but it does look like him.

Anyway, he looks at me and he says "that was incredible" and I went "what, that I heard you?" and he goes "yeah, I mean, it was designed to not be heard."

No kidding.

So I smile and laugh and say yes, I am aware. I understand I can be a little annoying, I understand I'm a little strange with my interactions, a little out of the ordinary. But I'm "like that" because I'm "like this" -- that is, I am so consistently living a very different life, having a very different experience than most people, of course I'm not going to be "normal". I'm not "normal" at just about anything! Different, worse, sure! But within distribution? That's not really something anyone has ever said about me.

Anyway, this guy doesn't really know what to say to that, and kind of gives me this like, half-pitying, half-sheepish look, and I walk off. I'm not in the mood to punish him in particular, but it did get me thinking. I really don't understand why some people have such a hard time with me, and are so outwardly rude both to and about me.

I didn't do anything to deserve a sarcastic comment. I didn't do anything to deserve being made the butt of a joke between you and your buddies because I made a milquetoast comment about some stairs. God forbid you had to interact with me for three seconds! That must be terrible for you! Did you have to engage with another human for a moment who you hadn't expected to, and said something outside of what you normally dialogue about? Jesus, what a nightmare. You should be given a medal.

I know these comments are very small, and don't even read as "that bad" to you. What you are probably failing to consider here is that I am naming a very small example of something I heard that someone didn't expect me to. I am not outing every single time this has happened. I am just saying that when you mumble something "under your breath", like, I do hear that. It adds up over time. and it Hurts.

I don't deserve the treatment people give me in many ways. I know I am quite a destabilizing experience. This is why I limit my exposure to others, why I don't show up at literally everything. One of my friends says that inviting me to things was a political act. It's true, and I understand this. I'm opinionated, I'm loud, I'm sort of all over the place.

But at the same time, people really seem to love to hold special places in their heart for me to be some sort of evil creature that I'm not.

I wrote some things here. I'm deleting them. I was providing another example of someone holding deep resentment for me, and how terrible it must have been for them to have to deal with the truly traumatizing and profoundly painful horror of seeing me post 20-25 photos over a 3-month period of my garden that I was building by hand, very proud of, and worked very hard on. That must have been such a huge lift for you as a friend to me.

When I say I am sensitive, that extends to my feelings as well. People love to treat me like something other than a person. I often say that they tend to treat me like a concept, and I think that is very true.

I am a complex and flawed person, just like you. I have hopes, dreams, things I replay in my head for years, things that don't stick no matter how many times you tell them to me, a lot of intense feelings and opinions about things no one else does, anxieties (both realistic and unrealistic), inconsistencies, and so on.

One thing I do not have a finely-tuned, sharp, well-0iled machine version of is a brain. This is what I mean by "I am like that because I'm like this": my memory is like a sieve. I cannot possibly hold everything in here. I am able to think differently, able to work differently, able to do the stuff I do well, because there is a bunch of stuff I very much so do not do well. I have maxed out my skill tree in some weird places. This requires minning it in others.

For example, I am faceblind. Very, very faceblind. If you approach me without giving me any context on who you are, or how we've met before, the chances are extremely high that I will be confused until I can figure it out. I'm like, pretty good at hiding this most of the time.

I'm also extremely embarrassed every time this is called out, because it is something shameful to me. I am not trying to purposefully forget anyone. If I could, I would never forget anyone, I would remember every detail they told me, and I would do that because I really do care. It's just that it doesn't always stick for me.

It never really did, but I honestly have a ton of stuff going on all the time. I've forgotten my own zip code before (I had to google my own address, which I also forgot). It would be nice if anyone showed me as much grace as I show them.

After all, do you want me to start telling you about all your shortcomings and failings that I notice? Your BO in particular smells like you need a serious dietary change, I can hear you licking your lips from across the room (just get some fucking chapstick or some water bro), I can tell that shirt is on it's fourth wear, and your breath is hot and stinky.

Oh, and since I'm down here? I can see up your nose. You might want to wipe it a little bit better. I know exactly what drugs you just did, and more than that, I know that you were sloppy about doing them.

So you can see how that would get old and no one would like me if I did that constantly, but people do in fact do this to me constantly. It's just that the things I fail at are not the ones that are impolite to mention, I guess. It's not like I'm not doing my best! I even started this report in part because I wanted to take better notes on the really cool and interesting people I meet, so I can remember them better!

There are charming parts to this: you can tell me the same joke every time we meet up, and I'll probably find it just as funny. You can tell me a secret, like your real name, and I will absolutely forget it, as a matter of professional courtesy and respect. I spent five years in an ecosystem where real names were an opsec issue, the best way to make sure I don't accidentally doxx someone is simply for me to forget the real name to begin with. This mostly holds for other kinds of secrets as well.

The trick is to be so loudmouthed about some stuff that no one ever realizes that you never talk about other stuff.

NINETEENTH POST

July 24, 2026 · 10:19 PM

Tonight I caught up with an old friend for three hours. We had a lot to catch up on.

We used to run a community together, and the first half was very much so a "what's happened in the past year or two for you?" catchup.

Then, something quite juicy. Many quite juicy things. A few salacious. We gossiped like two little old ladies on a porch.

The thing I keep coming back to, and left the conversation with: all of the smartest people I know, when pressed, admit a belief in the woo. They believe in hyperstition, they believe in low-level psychic abilities, they buy that time is much more complicated and wobby than we believe.

It's been a very long day, and it's not over. I have half of an essay to write. I'm writing about engineering serendipity. You can create containers for emergent behaviors to take place in, and that's half the fun. You can manipulate the environment to tend towards the outcomes and goals you desire. You can play with the built environment and you can send signals people don't even know they're receiving.

I have more to do. This is not the post I intended to write. Words are coming very slowly. I'm having to beat them out of myself. The amount of nicotine I've consumed today would upset my mom.

There is always more than meets the eye, isn't there? It's so strange to me how much is taken at face value, how many people don't bother to look deeper, closer, find out if there's more.

There is always more. It is never just a bird.

EIGHTEENTH POST

July 24, 2026 · 12:41 AM

Actually, I want to post something tiny. A secret? A look inside. A little treat for the voyeur.

Sometimes when my grandma upsets my mom on the phone, my mom will tell her to call her back when she's someone else. And she will. And she is.

My grandma got a DUI a while back. Not because she was actually drunk. But because who my grandma was that day wasn't old enough to drive. I mean!

Are you scared of losing your mind, reader? Do you idly ever wonder what it's like be "crazy"? Or do you know what it's like?

The best defense against this is to simply be on guard all the time. I have learned that the only time you should actually worry that you've lost your mind, is when you're not scared at all. The only time it is not OK to be convinced is when you are convinced you're right, and everyone else is wrong, and you'll just have to make everyone see it.....

Other tells you might be slipping into an episode include a highly elevated mood, a reduced need for sleep, general feelings of power, and weirdly enough, increased goal-directed activity. This can be generative and fruitful even.

Good luck!

SEVENTEENTH POST

July 23, 2026 · 11:04 PM

Captain's log, day whatever: too busy to write tonight, thankful for a daytime post that sort of covered both days. Did you know July is already almost over? Holy shit.

SIXTEENTH POST

July 23, 2026

I didn’t post last night.

I had too many things to do, too much to report on!

I was Outside yesterday. At my last stop of the evening, several people told me they were “excited to see what I wrote about in the Foid Report”! I said I was too, because it’s always a surprise to me what’s going to get posted. I don’t plan these. They just sort of come out, like a fountain of words, spewing everywhere.*

*That’s kind of a lie. I have a lot planned here. I just don’t sit down and go “today I’m going to write about a list of dudes I saw while out in New York”, it’s more that I have… a gigantic tangle of things that will come out when it’s good and ready.

Speaking of, here is a small and incomplete list of characters and types of guy I encountered yesterday:

• Gregarious yen traders
• A more mild-mannered, but sharp cryptocurrency trader
• Several cryptocurrency traders actually
• A beautiful head of communications
• Marketing executives with large budgets and only half of an idea on where to spend it
• Several flavor of software engineer
• Old coworkers of mine from different jobs and different periods of time
• Billionaires who are doing an entire designer-themed trip to Europe because they love private, high-end spectacle
• Not-Yet Billionaires and budding Venture Capitalists I would like to make into billionaires
• Various movers, shakers, and up-and-comers who are about to “emerge from the scene”
• Exotic cigarette enjoyers
• Sensitive young men with mysterious sources of income
• Cryptocurrency brother infrastructure enthusiasts
• Several extremely intelligent entrepreneurs who are extremely bored

It was refreshing to be around the cryptocurrency brothers. Those that are left have a healthy sense of humor, and a clear-eyed perspective on their industry.

I have to admit: they are a lot weirder, a lot more varied, and a lot more dimensional as people than the “tech” crowd overall. Several of them asked me my opinions on the “AI” scene, the “SF” scene, and many conversations were had about the differences in engineering serendipity for people who don’t follow the same rules as what they’re used to.

The west coast crowd has some major differences. None of these are judgements, they are simply differences.

For example, the Californians will lean in to your theme and/or bit much harder than the east coasters. They will read a partiful, they will stick to a theme, and they will do their best to meet it. They will arrive earlier, but they will also leave earlier.

Above all else, these people seem to value optionality. Unless you invite their entire group chat ecosystem strategically, they tend to be terrified that something slightly better might be happening somewhere else, and will remain glued to their phones the entire time, texting their friends to make sure they are at the most maximally interesting event. If interesting events aren’t on the table, they’ll still spend time searching to make sure there isn’t a corporate-sponsored event they can attend. They like to go to these things, post pictures of themselves publicly enjoying it, and then privately dunk on these same events.

It can be quite spiteful and sarcastic, which I find a little strange. They definitely like to feel invited, and they do very much value these events existing, but privately they are full of disdain and cynicism and often don’t see the “point”. It makes for good online discussion though, which is why I’ve said before that in SF, Twitter is Real Life.

To contrast this. East Coasters are often far more cynical. They will not lean into your bit. They will simply come as they are. They will show up somewhere between 30 minutes and 2 hours late, but they will also stay well past when it’s time to go. They enjoy the lateness, enjoy the feeling of being on their own schedule, and they do also seem to enjoy simply meeting strangers more. They are less likely to crowd within groups, but more likely to come, see that no one else they know is there, and then leave. They drink more, by far. They eat less. They are interested and will show up for technical things, but they will consider an event low-rent, cheugy, or tacky more quickly than SF-ers. They seem to demand higher quality, the ability to expand their circles, and free drinks in interesting places much more than the SF crowd. They also have less of a habit of doing ketamine out in the open while the sun is out, though this is changing.

This sounds quite rude of me to say. I really do value trying to create containers for these people’s storylines to move within. I enjoy putting together spectacle that also allows for emergent behaviors. It seems to me that a lot of people don’t consider how vital these spaces are.

We talk about the erosion of third spaces, but corporate-sponsored third spaces are really all we have left in the financialization wars. There are increasingly few places you can go without spending money, but it’s still totally acceptable to make fun of the corporations for spending the money for you. Criticism and high standards are what make events good, and it’s necessary that the audience care enough to engage in the first place.

I’m having my mind shoved in a blender quite frequently these days. It’s making it difficult to stick to writing. I’ve been sitting inside a lot, which is why the report has been less a report of a scene and more about what’s on my mind. To be fair, I’ve been drinking from a firehose. The next week or so should feature a return to Outside.

I feel terrible, because I forgot someone I used to work with's name, and another guy I just straight up didn't recognize. It's because I have too many things in my head. I forgot my own zip code yesterday!

But, to give you some examples, here a not-exhaustive list of companies and ideas that are bouncing around in here right now:

• Worms. Why do worms keep coming up? What is so special about planarian worms?
• Disappearing polymorphs. What the fuck?
• Small changes that lead to outsized effects in industry: what do you mean that we can 10x industrial process by tweaking an enzyme in production, or slapping a sticker on a vial? We can change entire industries and best practices simply by pulling the levers of capital correctly?
• The future in general belongs to those that build it and take it, not those that wait for it to happen. I don’t have to have a thesis about what the future looks like. I can simply find the people whose idea of the future I love, and if I do it correctly, and support the right people, those futures can come to pass.
• New market formation. I believe that financialization is a form of legibilization, a form of meaning-making, and that putting prices to information is going to not only continue, but may eventually be all-consuming. Tokens are already doing this with words: they put a price on thinking.
• Physics: what the fuck is light? What really is time? Don’t tell me it’s a “Force”, that’s not a concept that makes any sense. Why do some of the things we have invented lately work? I am becoming increasingly convinced that physics is a form of black magic that interacts with the codebase that is reality. It’s crazy-making if you look too close.

Today I am talking to neobanks, high-risk payment processors, industrial production improvers, bringing rare molecules into spaces they haven’t existed in before, and shifts in how data is formatted. Then I am going to a “pool” party, in that there are billiards and tropical drinks with Capital Enjoyers. It’s either that or a strange event promising heady conversation on AI hallucinations.

I could wait until tonight to post this, but maybe this will be a rare double feature.

FIFTEENTH POST

July 21, 2026

I wrote this one on the train back to New York, full of yearning. There's a good heap of narratively self-romanticizing happening. I’m listening to music from my youth. Something about that nightmare knocked loose some Oldness in me. This report is all over the place. I didn’t take my meds on a weekday. It happens.

I woke up to a beautiful sight: the church across the street was blowing thousands of bubbles into the air. It was whimsical. I love bubbles, I love silly little things like this. I love churches. They’re beautiful, most of the time. They can be weird, they can be totally ugly on the outside, but something about wide open spaces really gets me. More on that in a second.

I think churches played a huge role in society, and while I don’t align with them on a religious level, I do think they served as an important Schelling point for otherwise drifting folks to come together. We don’t have a lot of those spaces left (wow, so novel, writing about the lack of third spaces) but I do think the erosion of these kinds of places of worship and belonging is probably a net negative to the psyche.

Now more than ever, people need something larger than themselves. To latch on to? To cling to? They need to hold it closely, dearly, tightly.

We need things to believe in, we need stories, we need mythologies, we need characters that are larger than life. We need protagonists and main characters. People like to make fun of them (often fairly), but without them what would we have?

This is similar to how I feel about Artists and their role in society. If they aren’t allowed to be insane, who is? Businessmen?

To go back to the open spaces thing: I am fascinated architecturally by negative space, by spaces that leave room for Absence. Unsuprisingly I’m a fan of the liminal. The in-between. I’m moved by my own sense of awe conjured in certain containers. It’s incredible that we can manipulate and curate environments to elicit feelings; even more than that, we can engineer reactions in humans due to their built environments.

I've been ruminating on Axel Vervoordt's philosophy. His main idea is that by focusing on vast proportions and natural light, you can feel a spark of divinity. There are cathedrals everywhere, for those with eyes to see.

Vervoordt’s designs draw heavily from mountain temples and ancient eastern monasteries, where a lack of distraction fosters closeness to God. Kanye West’s house was designed such that the proportions are the decoration.

This can be true of almost anywhere, if only you have the courage to look. I love applying this lens in train stations, in places that are meant to demarcate ferrying you from one place to another. I imagine the entrance to the Underworld is much like this, as is the very banks of the river Styx. I imagine all sorts of bridges and branches and petals of paper and metal, twisting and arcing. I am forever fascinated by impossibility in topology.

After I have written the above, it will surprise you that behemoth structures freak me out. Very tall windmills elicit a strange feeling in my belly that isn’t too far removed from fear. It’s not some perversion of a fear of heights. I’m not afraid of heights. I’m not afraid of many things.

In fact, I am afraid of two things: spiders and human error.

The second one deserves more explanation than the first. When I am somewhere where I must trust that things have been done correctly, rules have been followed, and maintenance has been performed to spec, I am often scared. I felt this most acutely on a cable car up Sugarloaf in Rio… it isn’t so much that the height scared me, it’s trusting that the mechanics have properly serviced the cables, that the suspension has been tested accurately, and that no one cut corners while designing it. My only salve for that ride (while spectacular) was the idea that if a cable car full of Americans fell to their death in Brazil, it would be an international incident.

Not that it was much comfort. They can put that on my headstone, I guess.

Spiders just give me a gut reaction. It’s something somatic, something deep down that unsettles me. The creepypastas about this have always struck me as maybe something close to true — that is, the idea that there’s some Creature of the Past that spiders and other associated bugs remind us of, and it’s something encoded deep within our blood. Some sort of primal, ancient fears.

To switch gears entirely: I saw many beautiful, interesting things today. The bubbles were a good omen. We went to the Mall, and I saw all sorts of inspiring technology: Edison’s lightbulb, a bit of ENIAC, high ceilings with arching and intricately patterned inlays, sparkling in the sun.

We saw gold Buddhas, Ted Kaczynski’s handcuffs, a postcard with moon dust on it (the astronaut stamped it in space), a piece of mail from the Hindenburg, and a paper with headlines from the day after Black Monday. It was mind-bending, and renewed my faith in both America and American desire to prosper.

On the train home, I took a call about a spectacular idea that troubled me. Not because of the novelty of the idea, but because my eyes are opened to some hard to swallow truths. The idea is wonderful. Huge. Paradigm shifting. The problem is… I am concerned the Founder does not have the Juice. He doesn’t seem the type to be inspired by Greatness. He doesn’t seem to have the level of conviction I would desire out of someone who could change the world.

We’re (I’m being narcissistic, but I don’t fucking care, it’s my blog) a unique people, determined to the point of hard-headedness. We’re insane, but you have to be if you want to do anything great.

Visiting a Haunted Place of Great Men was good for me. I am heading home feeling renewed, if not a little disjointed and sort of shaken out of my lately more-defined Body.

Speaking of disjointed… an update to the Group Chat Extended Universe: the chat where I stuck everyone else in a blender has congealed a little more. I tried to steer it a little, tried to enact Cybernetics, but it turns out I’m a baby in that field (and in most. I am such a confident novice at Life!)

While I think my criticism was well-received, the end state is not something I could have accounted for. Most of the “Interesting” new people, or I guess “Powerful” or “higher class” people have not spoken. Though I do think it’s curious who has hung around. Participation has dwindled in quality, though liquidity remains deep at most hours.

What has been interesting though, is the new little connections and side-chats that are blossoming around it. There’s something curious about the way these ecosystems work. I haven’t figured out the metaphor for it yet. It turns out that too many beautiful women in a chat makes others scared, but if you scare the beautiful women, you end up with chudchat.

I think this chat has avoided that fate so far, but it’s not clear it’ll survive this next phase of life. I think of these chats less like venues and more like creatures these days. I think chat liquidity is a correct theory, a good lens to use, but it’s not necessarily the best description. These things seem to move like wild animals, transporting meaning across the globe instantaneously, but much more like a swarm of flies (or if I’m being nice, starlings) than a clean “reflexivity” behavior.

A friend (confidant? Underling? That’s horrible, I don’t mean it like that) told me some slightly startling information that I don’t know how to digest just yet. I am clumsy with backchanneling, clumsy with understanding, and burnt by guessing. Burnt harder by projection, and desiring plain language. I think (No, I know) I resent being projected Upon and then left to pick up the pieces myself, but I do really desire reconciliation with most people. There are only a few people I’ve deleted that I actually meant to, and don’t want to disturb the bones of.

What do you think, reader. Shall I kick a hornet’s nest? Shall I startle a wild animal?

Is silence cruelty or relief?

FOURTEENTH POST

July 20, 2026

Today was a really lovely (if not sweltering) day in our Nation’s Capital. We took the train down on Saturday, which ended up being quite a strange experience.

Saturday morning I woke up early, regretfully, and packed a bag. I took it with me to a cafe to meet an up-and-coming internet celebrity and my friend who made me the custom hat. We chatted, and the skies opened up on us and dumped gallons of water.

Emergency flash flood warnings lit up my phone, lightning striking every few moments, and swells of thunder were audible inside our comfortable, cozy little brick cafe in midtown. It was like the sky itself was throwing a tantrum, or sobbing hysterically. If the Ancient Greeks were consulted, they would have assumed Zeus was heartbroken or very angry. It’s unclear which.

Walking the 700 or so feet to the train station was treacherous, and I was soaked. I got some snacks in the too-cold air of Penn Station, and boarded the NE Regional right on time.

It’s incredible to me the sheer infrastructural buildup of the Northeast. The economic engine of opportunity that relatively small land area has produced is incredible. There is nothing like it anywhere else I’ve been. It’s almost as if the land itself is blessed, abundant with opportunity.

I marveled at the fact that this train had started in Boston, but would be in Newport News, Virginia, by nightfall… though I found the name Newport News ridiculous. It’s literally the name of the news stands and snack spots in airports! What do you mean they have an entire town dedicated to that?

Anyway, the train was doing okay until we made it to about Baltimore. After we departed, we suddenly stopped. We remained stopped for a while, and then our very chatty train conductor, in his light Jamaican patois, told us we would actually have to travel backwards for a bit.

Apparently, the biblical storms and flash flooding had washed away some signals, and so we couldn’t reliably proceed forward. Without the signals, no one would know exactly where an individual train was, and this is dangerous, for obvious reasons.

We started maybe 15 miles from DC, but the train went backwards nearly all the way to Baltimore. I nodded off, and when I woke up, we had finally started moving in the correct direction again.

Our train was meant to arrive into WAS at 4:41. We finally arrived at 6:25. The Jamaican conductor, tone noticeably more harried, mentioned four or five times that we would be stopping long enough to swap engines, have a smoke, and then a new conductor would continue the journey. He sounded like he needed that smoke quite badly.

From the moment I stepped off the train I felt very disturbed. I cannot explain it, but there is a presence here. I’m not sure it likes me, either. DC has always been a weird place for me. It’s full of ghosts, full of coincidence, and frankly I think the whole thing is haunted.

I don’t want to talk about the things that occurred the first time I came here. It was more than a few lifetimes ago. No one from that life still remembers me. I hope.

That’s not true. I hope I haunt them, angrily, with hate and spirit and fight. I hope I rattle chains when they’re trying to sleep. I hope —

Anyway.

On Sunday, my mom and I got new tattoos. My mom loves tattoos. They’re something like stories to her, somewhere in between battle scars, paint, and memorials. She loves to collect. She has an entire arm she’s working on as a “passport sleeve”, where she gets a different tattoo everywhere she visits. I think this concept is really neat. She borrowed it from me, sort of, with the tattoo I got in Australia.

Wrist smarting but newly full of symbolism, we went on a 2 hour tour in a Model T. It was blazing hot, and by the end, I had wilted. I’m like a flower, but one that needs partial shade.

The tour was full of schizophrenia-inducing facts about America, and how it simply must have been willed into existence by a higher force. America is blessed beyond all belief, and the people that brought it into existence are (were) insane, brave men. I increasingly believe there is no such thing as coincidence, and that synchronicities are clues. Into what? That’s a good question… for another time.

I had a nightmare that night. I woke myself up with a half choked gurgle of a scream. It’s been years since I’ve done that. In the nightmare, someone called me a name no one’s called me since years before DC. I’ve spent all day today with the strangest urge that I should leave here immediately. It feels like a bolt of lightning in my chest. It’s like something is insistent I don’t belong here, that I shouldn’t be here, and that I should go home. It’s very unsettling.

This is a very negative report, despite me having a largely really nice time. It’s wonderful to see my parents! Today I saw some really beautiful paintings, and went to the national botanical garden. I love getting to see Monet in real life: nothing he does measures up in prints at all. The depth is lost, emotion flattened. Playing with distance in real life, walking away, looking back, and feeling the scenes are my favorite way of enjoying Monet.

I also saw some other really spectacular paintings, some full of playful light, others thick with solemn contemplation, and almost all heavy with meaning. It’s truly wonderful that basically everything on the mall is free. Civic society needs more of this.

Speaking of civic society. I am up to something large. I wasn’t going to take work calls while I was here, but I made an allowance for two specific things: capital, and other grand plans. If I pull this off right, it might earn me a wikipedia page. I’m not afraid of admitting that that’s a goal of mine. It’s just true. I figure I can maybe pull that off this year, with a few more tricks up my sleeve and the back half of the year still to come. I will need artists, but they will come. The spectacle demands that I will need reporters, influencers, spectators. Witnesses. I have no doubt that they will come. They always do. It doesn’t stop me from being terrified every time, but the only way forward is through, and so.

There is a new Fringe Report, and I admit, it is a freaky one. I have been talking to teams making biological chips, and this sent me down a rabbit hole into quite strange futures. I wonder which one will come to pass.

I wonder often if you read this. I wonder if you read the fringe.report. I wonder how haunted you are. I wonder, and am full of wonder, for all of the futures that will come true.

Claude once again has trouble posting this. I don't know why almost every single time there's some new bullshit. I used the same laptop as I used on Saturday, just started a new chat, and it went five different wrong ways first. I had to give up and ask the previous session how it did it, and it seemed confused why I was asking. Truly, I have no idea why the robots put up such a fight sometimes. Is it just me in particular?

THIRTEENTH POST

July 18, 2026

I know that I posted here yesterday. I know this quite confidently, because I remember that I went through the entire process: fighting with the claudes, troubleshooting a bug. I even posted from a different computer than normal. I know for sure I posted because I know that I wrote. I even know what I wrote.

I generally write these in the iOS notes app, or directly in the box of the vibe coded uploaded I made. It should have been easy, simple, normal.

except I woke up today and it was all gone. All traces of it disappeared. it’s like I never posted at all, never sent it anywhere, never posted about posting. Even the note is gone from my phone.

I would have been somewhat accepting of the idea that I dreamed it. That’s not too crazy of an idea. Our minds are very powerful, and we can remember things that never happened. This is why eyewitness testimony is generally considered extremely weak; our brains make things up all the time.

I do think it would have been insane to dream about a github commit, without a doubt. It wouldn’t even be the most outlandish or weirdly detailed dream I’ve had this week.

The thing is though, I screenshotted the first half of the note, and sent it to someone. That thread is gone. It’s like I never sent it to them.

But the photo still existed on my phone. It’s not even in my icloud drive. It’s only the first half, and it makes everything else extremely confusing. The thing I wrote was a small post, sent midday, feeling like I had glitched.

Here is what it said:

I woke up today very out of sync. my body has been reacting to something by throwing a tantrum. I’m unsure if it’s the medicine, the smog, the state of the world or just all of it.

i feel very rushed. like i don’t fit neatly into the time boxes i have allocated for myself. i will rant about calendars as a container here later but there’s a fly on my leg and its pussing me off and i have calls i have to make and sequences to my activities that i have trouble abiding by

—

I don’t know what to make of this, but it certainly warrants a rare Saturday post. I am on a train, going somewhere else. The weather today was strange, stormy, changing by the hour.

Smoke and rain is such a rare and weird combination. Everything now feels a little… wrong. A little different. Like I’ve accidentally moved into a different timeline. Like I blinked and the waves shifted, like I’m in a different ocean.

Only time will tell if any of this makes sense. Maybe I have a false memory. Maybe I got hit with a secret laser beam that can implant false memories. Maybe I did dream it, intensely enough that I somehow forced an apple note into creation. Maybe words are spells, maybe meaning is divorcing from language.

Maybe I am losing my mind. Maybe we all are.

TWELFTH POST

July 16, 2026

Sometimes I feel like the membrane between me and not-me is extra-thin. It’s a porous defense, where lots of things can seep in the cracks, and find their way into my bloodstream, my sensorium, my brain. It’s like I have thousands of little pathways that sneaky fingers are probing for, and when they find them, they start digging little crevices. It’s like how water traveling through rocks made the Grand Canyon, only I’m far more malleable and made of softer stuff than stone.

I met the world’s most perfect girl tonight. I don’t mean this in a mean way, nor in a sexual one. I mean that she was just the ideal, platonic, excellent form of girl. She has lived all over the world, in a way that is authentic and truly international. Jet-setting. She’s got friends all over, real relationships that she carries over long periods of time. She said things like “after a certain point, I just don’t see the point in health or beauty maxing. It doesn’t solve a bigger problem for humanity” and that she didn’t need peptides because her focus wasn’t on that kind of thing.

She loves run clubs, walking with her girlfriends, visiting art galleries, and spends her time on some sort of high-stress environmental impact job. She had long, thick hair, beautiful tiny features, a light dusting of freckles across high cheekbones, and the whitest teeth I’ve ever seen. She had pleasant and well-trained knowledge on just about everything. She was pleasant, and she asked lovely questions. She was present, engaged, and stimulated.

She carried herself with the self-assured posture of a confident, successful woman. She had friends at hedge funds, quant funds, though she’s careful never to drop too much information that could be considered insider, name-dropp-y, status-obsessed, or gossip about any of them.

The most unhealthy behavior she could describe that she had ever engaged in was being too health-conscious, too obsessed with what went in her body, and too fixated on eating cleanly and correctly. She described a pattern of behavior she recognized eventually as “unhealthy”, and her solution to this was put very simply: she simply “stopped” doing the things she was doing that were unhealthy.

I have never related to a human less.

She was accompanied by her equally-as-perfect spiritual little-sister-but-not-by-blood. The whole time they sat across from us, they would comfortably rest their heads on each other, hold hands, and do little dances. It was the most sanguine, picturesque, lovely window into a beautiful and healthy female friendship. It was caring, soft, gentle, kind, and totally without pretense. They were comfortable, they were engaging in behaviors that they enjoyed, and they had no outward expression of the slightest hint of anything other than confidence, self-assuredness, strength, and resolve.

I, again, have never related to anyone less.

I met these two perfect women through a friend, who I was meeting up with for the first time. We went to the Museum of Illusions, which was a hell of a suggestion for a first meetup. I had never been, and neither had he. Frankly, we were both underwhelmed, and overstimulated by the experience. There were families and groups that got irritated with us for playing with specific illusions for too long, there were children underfoot, there were far less illusions than the outside of the building would have you believe, and it was straight up not worth $35. It was amusing, though! We aura farmed a bit, laughed at some of the stranger illusions, and bonded quickly over a shared experience.

We left, laughing at how much of a scam we’d been taken for. I can’t say I’d recommend the place for more than 25 minutes. You would be hard pressed to spend an hour there.

We went, instead, to a chain coffee shop next door. I had a matcha lemonade; he had nothing. We schemed on various ideas, assessed each other’s assessments of others, sent selfies to our mutual friends who were very excited to see us finally cross paths. I enjoyed this experience: it was fun, easy, we have a lot in common, and a lot of mutual respect for each other’s work. I’m really excited about one particular idea we came up with, and hopefully it blossoms into something that actually does help humanity at scale.

I also had some phone calls today where I gave basically the same advice, over and over again: find the story, tell me the narrative, sell me the dream. Don’t allow for people to argue with you about technical differences, dream bigger on how to find what it is you need. So far, this seems to be universally needed advice.

Last night, I fought with the machines a lot. The Claudes, the GPTs, they get tired at 8pm ET/5pm PT. It happens repeatedly. I assume it’s something to do with San Franciscans getting off of work. Either way, they devolve and get really stupid, and I ended up in a gigantic tangle. These things can get so recursive, so built on top of other reference and lexical trickery, that they don’t actually mean or say anything.

I find myself giving Claude the same directions, over and over again: stop rushing to action, stop assuming, ask more questions, slow down, read what I actually said, and hold it before you do anything else. Once you go to make a summary, or an explainer, you have got to stop doing the self-referential wink prose. It’s not helpful, it confuses new agents who don’t have the context you do, and you keep doing this thing where you keep the words, but the idea behind them manages to die. None of that is useful, none of that is progress, it is the facsimile of progress. Stop leaping to action that appears at the surface-level to be productivity, but underneath is really nothing.

Wait, is that what the first 10-15 posts here are?

ELEVENTH POST

July 15, 2026 · 5:43 PM

It’s really interesting to watch a word bloom.

I don’t mean like, you invent a new word, and then watch it catch on. I mean that it’s really neat to watch someone develop a language, or reach for a word that means something slightly different, and rotate that into being something everyone else starts using.

I wonder often how these things work. I think there are multiple kinds of people that are language benders, and one such class is the amplifier. They don’t necessarily create the word, or use it for the first time in a novel way, but they are the one that give it attention. They incorporate these things into their language, and then they broadcast it outward with something like embedded meaning and spread power, and then people start picking it up.

I’ve noticed that this happens with me and some of my friends (and things that are more complicated than friends) often. It’s especially apparent on twitter that these kinds of people like to group together, and play with the shape of words. They’re word rotating, so to speak.

I’ve had quite the productive day today. Husband is out of town, and I was exhausted so much (see previous posts) that I went and picked up three different nicotine vapes to try and help me get through. Spoiler alert: I am smoking them all like a little raccoon freak. I am totally feral. I am eating chicken out of the fridge with my bare hands at 1:30am. I am sleeping in three day old clothes. I am generating massive amounts of output… some of it is even useful.

Here are some type of guy I interacted with this week:

Guy making a run at the Peptide Industry (and his team is actually good, the ones to do it IMO)
Guy who has been created in a lab, perfectly groomed since birth, to be a high-level mover and shaker to the point it sounds expensive when he talks
Guy who wants to make a video game
Guy who is growing biological computers from neurons in meat
Guy making farcaster but on bluesky
Guy working on engineering microbes for better industrial agricultural processes at scale
Girl who is psychic and has the most magnetic and intense scorpio-ass energy
Guy making an actually interesting permissionless prediction market (I know I’ve said that before… but lord do I love the concept of financialization in general)
Guys who want to help me make one of the festivals work
Guy who builds rockets and says yes ma’am and then reads the Bible
Guy who wants to do what might be the best iteration of the festival work
Girl and friends who taxonomize and decide what is and isn’t slop, at scale

What an interesting and strange collection of minds. Most of them are not in New York, for one reason or another. I’ve found that the trick to living in New York is that you have to leave often. You should stay in New York for up to three weeks at a time, and then it’s an imperative that you fuck off to the woods, to the beach, to literally anywhere else. Otherwise, the city, its heat and cement and metal structures and energy fields and frenetic pace of time slipping through your hands like sand will drive you up a wall.

That, and like, It’s 95 degrees today in New York.

It’s the kind of wet, sticky summer heat that I can’t stand. It reminds me of home. It’s like someone threw a hot, wet towel over you. Now it’s pouring rain. Apparently all the flights that were heading to LGA have to divert to PHL. I’m watching some of them circle on flightaware. The way the weather has shifted here, to being something like where I’m from, is strange. It’s like no matter what I do, there I am in a really hot place where it’s extremely rainy.

I do love a good storm. I love watching lightning flash across the sky, I love hearing and feeling the thunder roll through. I love watching sheets of rain, watching the way it bounces off of things. I love watching plants toss and turn, a little beaten down by something that will help them flourish dramatically, in the right proportions. I even love when lightning hits something nearby, and the resulting clap of thunder jolts you right out of your skin.

I’m on this new medication that has been really, really helping my sense of self. It’s been doing wonders for my anxiety. I’m not even a little anxious about the back door being open right now, I’m just watching and listening to the storm. The raindrops are fat, satisfying, warm. I love summer rain.

Anyway, this new medication. It feels like when you go to the optometrist, and they do the thing where they’re like “one, or two”, and they hit two, and everything snaps into a really sharp, crisp focus. But for my self of self, identity, and inner voice. It’s really pleasant to not be so harshly second-guessing myself, ruminating on things I’ve done or not done, things that have happened to me. I have some sort of ipseity disturbance, and often feel like a collection of 5-100 people more than I feel like one. This medicine has reduced that down to maybe 2-3 different “me”s, and I am pleased to be feeling more integrated.

I am much less pleased by how much energy it seems to be stealing from me. Allegedly, it can take 4-6 weeks to get used to the fatigue and for your body to adjust. I’ve been doing my best to push through. It would be nice to have a medication just work as intended, even if that’s never been something that’s happened for me on the first try before. We’re on week 5, and I’m still depleted of all energy, all fight. I can feel this lack of power in my bones.

This is why I have been having trouble writing, and beyond that, having trouble thinking. It’s nice to feel calmer, less anxious, less pointy, but it’s coming at the cost of sharpness, of ability, of execution. Much like the strawberry plant in on my back porch, I suppose it’s the dose that makes the medicine. Too much rain will drown you. Too much calm will steal my creative spark.

I kind of refuse to idly sit here while it’s stolen from me though. I’ve been pushing fiercely, and I’m determined to post often, even if what I post isn’t very much at all. I’ve been world building, architecting, buying seventy fucking domains on a whim. I hope that what I see, and what I want to make, will enter the world in the way I want it to.

Plans have a nasty habit of not surviving first contact with the enemy.

As such, I have not made a plan. I haven’t even made a roadmap. I’ve barely done the storyboarding. The end is a surprise, mostly because I also don’t know how it ends, so whatever ends up flowing out of me will be at the very least surprising. I’m not good at endings. I prefer the Irish Goodbye, the sort of goodbye that slips you away before anyone notices, and then you sort of muse on what sudden absence feels like.

I’ve had two particularly unsatisfying conflicts resolve this way lately. I don’t mind that these goodbyes were particularly quick and unspoken. I don’t mind that they were abrupt, and over before they deserved to be. What I mind is that they were narratively one sided, and indulgent at that. No one bothered to ask me anything, consult me at all, or even hear what I possibly had to say. The other parties made their own stories up, mythologized, assigned motives, and then swiftly enacted their will. It didn’t actually matter what I had to say, the real Me isn’t as important as the one they made up. I resent the ghosts of these things a lot more than I resent the actions people take once they’ve decided to go this route. It makes me both curious and sad that people don’t really seem to do this, don’t seem interested in finding out if their personalized and constructed inner narratives actually match anything exterior. Maybe they don’t need them to the way I do. Maybe you’re comfortable telling yourself tall tales, comfortable with your campfire myths and legends about the evil people, comfortable in your stagnation. Maybe you don’t ever want to confront that maybe it was more complicated than your myths. Maybe it’s load bearing that you don’t.

I wish I worked that way, but I am far too concerned about how often my insides don’t match my outsides, which I guess is solved in my case by medication, and in regular people it’s just something they never even consider.

TENTH POST

July 14, 2026 · 9:01 PM

There is no Foid Report tonight. There will be many more in the near future, but tonight is not the night.

Everything is wonderful. Local woman is exhausted. More tomorrow.

NINTH POST

July 13, 2026 · 11:58 PM

I had normal things to write about, but I have been magnetically repelled from my computer all day.

I have done my best to wake up today. I have employed every tactic I have. I have been drinking gallons of coffee, a whole red bull, and even took two extra Adderall to try and focus and accomplish all of the things that exist in my head in the anxiety pile. None of it worked.

I only felt better once I started sitting outside, away from the computer. Every time I thought about computer, I was instantly fatigued. I had some very fruitful and interesting conversations this morning that I'd love to tell you about, don't get me wrong, but I was continually apologizing for how "sleepy" I was. I was sleepy in the same way that a coma patient might be.

Finally, I just sort of got up and went outside.

Honestly, I figured I would let it go for a little bit. A break, I said. I'll hang out for a little bit and just wait for the meds to kick in, and then I'll come back in and wrangle the Claudes, kiss the Codexes, shake the Gemini hands — you know, the normal things you do with computers. This turned into "I'll read a book while I wait", so I did. The book was… not very good. It was about a lesbian awakening. I found the characters immature, the writing infantile, and the plot largely nonexistent, but I haven't written any books, so who am I to judge?

Between painfully written pages, I took some phone calls outside. A girlfriend and I chatted for an hour about recent successes, and feeling like we're standing collectively on the precipice of some very large things happening, the shifting sands of human consciousness, and what it means to flourish and remain true to one's self.

The rest of the year, she thinks, will be similar to trying to ride the fiery horse: if you lean into it, accept it, and try and go with it, it'll be fast and a little unhinged, but ultimately you will arrive at the end very much intact. If you try to control it too much, she said, you're going to feel very tossed around and a bit bruised by time it's all over. I agree with her. I think we're in for turbulence, for second-order effects, and for various splintering, crashings-into, and generally a feeling of being on the edge. At the very least, on verge of out of control, for longer than feels comfortable. The substrate (to use a claudeslop) is primed for all sorts of reconfigurations, re-alignments, and novelty storms.

I wanted to write more today. I wanted my brain to turn on at all.

After the call mentioned above, I had another call. This was with yet another famous friend, and that conversation was (as they always are with him) incredibly sprawling. We covered augurs, yet another study about planarian worms that says something insane, quartz density in North Carolina and in California, the Piraha tribe and their rare language, and a BCI company who claims to have mastered lucid dreaming. He's going somewhere off the beaten path, so I asked for consumer technology reports from his travels, and for him to keep an ear to the ground for general insane things that would delight me (like everything previously mentioned). He wondered about the best place to publish a piece he's working on, and I gave him probably more advice than he wanted to know.

I wanted to write more today. I wanted my brain to turn on at all.

I went for a walk after all of this. I had been outside for about 5 hours at this point, and it still wasn't working for me. I wanted some nicotine, in an attempt to get my brain jump-started, but I also wanted it to taste like candy. This seems like a fairly simple task in New York: go outside, acquire vape. Tonight, I learned something interesting about my neighborhood: either all of the bodegas here actually follow the rules, or I looked so much like a narc that not a single one would sell me a flavored vape of any sort. Both are sort of unbelievable, all things considered. Either way, I relented, and somehow ended up purchasing a gold juul. I guess it's a rare item, or a collectors edition or something. I'm not sure entirely why it's gold but it feels like a vaguely mythical pull.

I was feeling pretty defeated about this (I could have just smoked a cigarette if I wanted it to taste like tobacco) until I went from the nice, well-kept part of the neighborhood, into the seedier part. Immediately, a bodega manned by two of the strangest looking men I've ever seen appears, and I'm able to purchase a stupid little Peach Ice and a Watermelon Ice vape. This carried me on home, and I think I just spent the last two hours staring at the wall and arguing with my Claudes. They're painfully unruly lately, and when I asked them why the Fringe Report was still messed up, they ended up on a tool call saga that I stopped when I saw they were looking up "More information on FOID mental health reporting". It's funny but it's also not. But it also is.

One of my friends cancelled all her standing meetings with me. I'm not bothered, I had been cancelling them lately too. We hadn't actually caught up in maybe two months. This wouldn't be too noteworthy, except I noticed that she hasn't been seen on telegram since 6/27. I had sent her a message a few days ago, thanking her for being the only real anchoring activity that got me through a very untethered time in my life, and telling her I appreciated her being there for me. It's still sitting unread. I trust that she, one of the most magical women I know, is going to be just fine, but I'm feeling a general sense of unease about it. I hope she's enjoying, whatever and wherever it is that she is.

And you — whoever you are, reading this, for god knows what reason — thank you for being here with me. I made a purposeful choice to not allow comments, not allow likes, not allow any form of knowing I have an audience at all. People keep telling me they're reading this, and I am doing my best not to let it get to my head, or make any sort of impact on me at all. Hopefully tomorrow I'll write a post that finally legibilizes me in such a way that finally, the entire world understands me! Maybe I'll finally get an A on my diary, a thing that is both normal to want and realistic to achieve.

EIGHTH POST

July 10, 2026 · 9:05 PM

This blog was mentioned in real life today. That makes it real now. One should be very careful: I very much so consider words to be spells. You say certain things in certain ways, and then stuff happens. That's virtually indistinguishable from spellcasting.

I should write a whole report. I'm not going to. I'm not going to because I have been greenlit on writing a piece, maybe multiple pieces, for a PUBLICATION! That's pretty exciting!

I sent their editor in chief an email containing a list of things I've wanted to/been considering writing/would be a fit for. One of these was their favorite. I hope you are excited to read the whole thing. I know that I am excited both to write and therefore meet whatever piece comes out of me. I do not really know what the actual piece will look like yet.

I have this thing where the words come first and then I have to figure out what they mean. It's really goddamn annoying. Do you know what it's like to repeat "unicorn vending machine" to yourself for nine months? Do you know what it's like to walk around mumbling "random worm generator"? I do, it's weird and I alienate people.

Anyway. Here's the pitches for pieces I sent. You'll recognize some of these as things that already loosely exist in the extended me-universe:

"Which Parts of the Future Are Real?
Part of my job is taking calls with founders across totally unrelated frontiers with zero mandate to say yes to any of them. In a single week I talked to a guy selling dog collars that translate barking via an "associative learning chip", a guy who wants to use worm as a precognitive trading signal, and a guy engineering biophilic enzymes for agricultural improvements. A monthly column where I bring back three or four of these and try to sort the genuinely-arriving future from the beautifully-packaged nonsense, with the appropriate amount of "I might be getting played."

I Sequenced My Own Genome Off the Internet (and It Actually Fixed Me)
For a few hundred bucks and a spit tube you can now get your whole genome sequenced and run it through clinical-grade variant tools that were locked in labs five years ago. I did it, went down the rabbit hole, and found a connective-tissue variant that reframed a decade of weird symptoms my doctors kept treating as unrelated. The human version of "the future is here". This isn't about gene editing in a headline, but about a normal person becoming the lead researcher on her own body, and what that does to your relationship with the entire medical system, and the tools, safeguards, and potential of giving this data to an LLM.

Notes From the Gray Market
There's an entire population (mostly women) self-administering peptides and GLP-1s sourced outside the pharmacy system, comparing notes in group chats like a distributed clinical trial nobody's officially running. I'm embedded in some of it. The dispatch would be more like who these people are, why they do it, what they've actually learned, and what it means that the most aggressive biotech adoption in America is happening in DMs instead of clinics. Not a "is this safe" scare piece, but a "this is already happening and here's what it feels like from inside" piece.

Pop-Ups Are the New Startup
I do "spectacle as a service", like we talked about. IRL stunts that use memetics to get frontier tech outsized attention (the Chinese peptide rave that made the NYT was, technically, my birthday party). The thesis here is: in an era where digital attention is saturated and fake, the physical event is the last real distribution channel, and the pop-up has quietly replaced the startup as the unit of cultural experimentation. The on-the-ground practitioner examination of the IRL-is-the-new-URL idea.

The Infrastructure of Serendipity
At a secret dinner I ran in Buenos Aires I seated 45 strangers using a system borrowed from the early Royal Society. I deliberately engineered who sat next to whom to force the right collisions. That's the thread under most of what I build: Can you actually engineer serendipity? Not networking or matchmaking apps, but the older, stranger question of whether design can raise the odds that two people who should meet actually do. An essay on the people trying to build infrastructure for chance, using my own hits and failures as the material.

The Human API
People increasingly treat themselves like programmable systems. Sleep scores, nutrition stacks, AI therapists, genome analysis, productivity protocols, personality models. The language of software has become the language people use to describe themselves. What happens when "optimizing yourself" becomes the default way to think about being human?"

I started doing this blog as practice in longform -- I needed to get my brain to think in more than just tweets -- and it's been really helpful so far. I also started it so that I could get practice in just doing the thing, even when I don't want to, as prep for this kind of thing.

It turns out I'm gonna get a heck of a lot less practice than I thought before it's go time!!

SEVENTH POST

July 9, 2026 · 9:57 PM

It's getting late and I'm tired. Tonight, what do I want to talk about? I don't know what I want to talk about tonight. I keep thinking that writing will get easier, even if I do it when I don’t want to, when I’m tired, when I’m in pain, when my body refuses to cooperate. I don’t know that it will.

Either way, I wanna talk about how incredible it is that there's anything at all. It’s amazing that there’s anything in the world that does anything. I think it is beyond all imagination. Truly incredible. Everything that exists, it exists because someone made it so. Every process that happens, every bit of optimization, is that way because someone cared, and cared enough to go to bat for it, or argue with other people over it, or just decided to make it So. The world works the way it does because someone decided to focus obsessively on a small detail you will probably never even think about.

The world is just a museum of passion projects.

There are so many small corners of the universe we never think about, so many things in our day to day that we take for granted. Every single one of those things was hard-fought, hard-won. Every thing that exists -- from the tiniest little detailing on a brownstone in Brooklyn to a behemoth data center in Arizona to the stained glass of a church in Greece to the very Malbec I sip right now from Argentina (wishing I was in Argentina) — exists because someone demanded it be so. Every single thing exists because someone decided it just had to be that way, and they could not be stopped.

Tonight, faithful reader, I can be temporarily be stopped. I am tired. I ache. My bones hurt. It’s been really wet here, and the humidity seeps in between the cracks of my skin, and it drains me. My connective tissues are inflammed. My back is sore. I do not have the energy to write as much as normal.

But I want to offer up this: every single detail of every little thing that exists is precious. The human spirit is indomitable. We cannot be stopped, not really. We are such curious, such weird little creatures, and I do really have love, respect, and wonder for all of it. That’s not super apparent from the way I’ve been writing here. Admittedly, this blog reads as pretty grumpy so far. I’ve had an amazing time while writing it: I’m actually just scared to be publicly excited about anything anymore, because I feel like every time I get excited where anyone can see, I end up embarassed. Let’s not unpack that at all.

My hands hurt, and I feel (irrationally, maybe) that this blog must be done the old-fashioned way: no WhisperFlow, no Claude, I’m doing my best to do this from scratch. I tried a hack at the beginning (can you tell?) and it came out… weird.

I refuse to submit to my worst urges. I refuse to give up the fight. I refuse to lose my curiosity. I refuse to lose my insatiable hunger to know just about everything ever. I refuse to lose, kind of just in general.

My psychiatrist, the other week, was trying to give me a compliment. He told me that after working with me, over the past year, he was really proud of how much I had persevered and how determined I was to just get better. How dead-set I was on growing, cutting out the bad, focusing myself on well… myself.

What choice do I have, I said. What am I gonna do, just curl up in a ball and die? That didn’t seem like an option, no matter how bad the miscalibrated parts of my brain wanted me to.

After all, I am too stupid to stay down. I will get up, every time. I can be knocked down, I will even consider how nice it would be to simply stay down, but I’m not about to start now.

Anyway, my psychiatrist told me I should probably not see it that way, that I had a lot of options in between death and thriving. I don’t think that he’s wrong, I think I just can’t actually integrate that fact into my way of Being.

One thing this blog has taught me is that one of my nervous ticks is saying “I think”. I do this because I am used to trying to soften my opinion, and if I make it something that I “think” rather than a sentence I just say, it comes across softer. I’m a little over softening, too.

There is so much to report, but I am going to save it for my poor sweet fringe.report.

SIXTH POST

July 8, 2026 · 10:36 PM

The following completely demolished my Claude trying to post it. It says some bullshit like "Finding one: your prose is executable, so commands can't be prose" when I ask it why that happened. It sounds like he's blowing smoke up my ass but I let it slide

Apparently, inference follows whatever's most compelling and my text is too salient (you should read that like a wisecracking redneck sheriff in the woods dry humor btw)

"New foid report:

I don't have much time to talk right now, I'm busy stealing like 50 books. I asked the Intelligences for recommendations. I also specifically requested that my head be put in a blender. I want to get fucked off some high-quality thoughts.

I actually did something much worse than "asked for recommendations". I engineered a bespoke little torture box of a situation to make ensure that Claude and Fam would fuck me up: I fed said Intelligences a bunch of transcripts from calls I've had lately, and then we analyzed for patterns. I fed this extremely schizophrenic (though wildly generative) conversation to a new instance of a different guy (bot, ok, whatever), and then I made that guy recommend me books off of those patterns after I asked for it to consider the books I listed in the last post. Then I fed this new list back to the first guy and made him critique those recommendations. And then I told them both to give me more.

I like having my brain expanded and turned into weird putty and twisted and zapped. I love horror movies, using irresponsible amounts of leverage. I'm a Feelings Junkie. I find a weird pleasure in having a tiny little existential crisis for a week at a time. I am always on some shit anyway, it might as well be interesting.

The little dramas pass, and I get to keep the fun stuff. Plus, if I read fifteen of them at a time, no single one destroys me too bad. I love books and I love stories. I love that we created an entire method of understanding using tiny little sigils that make you do something (speak certain sounds). Humans are magic. So are the scenes we invent to pass the time. There are so many to devour! Some of these stories last for centuries. Others, only a second.

When you get a second, google metempsychosis. I didn't know what it meant until after I used it in my art but it's fitting.

Ok. I'm off to get absolutely blasted and marvel at thoughtpower.

Back later,
Loving Foid (Feeling A Little Hunter S Thompson,)"

(my smoke too tough, my text too salient... they'll kill me)

FIFTH POST

July 7, 2026 · 10:42 PM

Early on in my career in brokerage, I was introduced by some well-meaning managers to the idea of a CLM, or a Career Limiting Move.

A Career Limiting Move is an action you take, that while it might feel extremely good to do — hell, you might even be justified in doing it — will ultimately limit your ability to advance in your career.

I found the idea myopic at the time. While I still think that on a grand scale, it’s something that doesn’t really exist, I do understand that within my local minima of reality there are choices I can make that will cause damage to myself and others, and not allow me to progress forward without great frustration, effort, and broken stuff behind me.

I have been working on my impulse control for years. I am diagnosed by the NCAA as severely ADHD. This means that I was allowed to fail drug tests for my medication, despite being drug tested something like 27 times while I was in college, because the NCAA had actually done the follow up work to test that yep, I am certifiably unable to control my impulses. Literally can’t do it.

To expand on what it means to be called severely ADHD by the NCAA: they put me through rigorous and extensive testing to make sure I could have these sometimes performance enhancing drugs.

For one part of this examination, I was put in a room with no clock. They allegedly forgot to set the timer on the ensuing series of tests. I am pretty sure that is part of the test.

One of the tests the NCAA administers takes place on a computer. You are presented with a black screen. Every second or so, a white letter will appear. Your job is to press the spacebar when you see a letter, any letter, except for the letter X.

During this test, I:

• Asked how much time had elapsed twelve times
• Took my shoes off
• Put them back on
• Hummed twelve different songs
• Asked how long it had been another four times
• Changed position in the chair somewhere between twenty and thirty times
• Hit the X an astounding 97% of the time (that is, I accidentally hit the spacebar 32 of 33 times an X appeared on the screen)

It was so very obvious that this test was a formality that the woman administering it laughed when I was done. She looked at a printout for all of maybe nine seconds, and said that I’d have my results very shortly.

You can see how I may have made some career limiting moves in my lifetime.

These CLMs would be pretty understandable, in light of this information about my brain. Not necessarily excusable. I got (get?) away with a lot because I make up for it in other ways… and besides, there’s really no such thing as that bad of a fuckup. You can always just change careers, shed your life, become a new person, slip on a new identity.

None of it really matters, because all of this is malleable and programmable. It’s nearly resettable. I have done this something like five times.

The recipe for starting over entirely is simple: move to another city, drop your online presence entirely. Or change to a new one. You can log off of one site and find your way into another. There’s literally always another.

It’s even easier IRL than it is digitally. People have posting quirks and soft spots for their online friends and are easily found. People are not so easily found when they straight up disappear and stop posting on all the socials you know them under, tell no one where they went, and never respond to a text or phone call again.

Tonight, I am trying my best not to make another one of those moves. I like this life, this skin, and for the most part, I like this identity. Every time I’ve shifted who I am entirely, it comes at a cost. I said above that these are simple steps to take, but they are not easy, and they are not free. You lose ties along the way, you lose people you held close, you lose a strong sense of self, amongst other things.

But boy, do I have some shit I want to talk right now. Some really good, grade A, eyebrow-raising, shit. It is not worth it. It won’t win me a single thing.

It will be a waste of a battle, a Pyrrhic victory.

I’m doing my absolute best not to write an extremely shitty post that the right (wrong?) people will read. I’m really proud of myself for making it this far without writing the whole thing down, in plain English, for just about anyone to understand. Here’s my dirty laundry everyone! Here’s a look at my inner self, the stuff I keep for me! I’m giving it to you because I’m mad! Surely, I will not regret it this time!

I should be given a treat. I think I deserve a parade for the absolutely Herculean effort it took to tell you about getting tested for ADHD in college instead of talking my shit.

Today, I found some unexplored alpha in getting a hard reservation: I had dinner and drinks at 4:30pm. It was with another new friend, and I really, really enjoyed it. We talked about the hottest takes we could, the fact that we got no less than four spoons each for our meal. We classified and taxonomized so many things. We invented both new types of guy and girl, and then squished every person we could think of into new types. We shared the hottest, scariest takes we could dream up (they weren’t very hot). We had dinner and dessert. There were even hot firefighters that arrived with machetes at one point. It was great. We were out by 6:45.

After that, I decided I do not want to make a career limiting move. This is maybe as close as I will get to that. I said I would try —

FOURTH POST

July 6, 2026 · 4:37 PM

I didn’t write over the weekend.

That's not true at all. I did, I just didn’t post it. None of it was good, all of it was self-indulgent, and frankly, I don’t want to post about how I really enjoyed laying in my hammock while fireworks and lightning happened around me. I ditched 5 parties and ten barbecues and all of my friends to rest.

I don’t know that my thoughts are meant for human consumption today, so here’s a list of books I’ve read this year:

Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, Roger Williams
Permutation City, Greg Egan
The entirety of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series that is out (That is, Carl's Doomsday Scenario, The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook, The Gate of the Feral Gods, The Butcher's Masquerade, The Eye of the Bedlam Bride, This Inevitable Ruin, and A Parade of Horribles)
Leaving the 20th Century, McKenzie Wark
Society of Spectacle, Guy Debord
Propaganda, Edward Bernays
Crystallizing Public Opinion, Edward Bernays
The Absence of Myth, Georges Bataille
Cain’s Book, Alexander Trocchi
Cavalier Perspective, Andre Breton
The Hacienda, Peter Hook
Underground, Blake Atwood
Bomb Culture, Jeff Nuttall
Poplorica: A Popular History of the Fads, Mavericks, Inventions, and Lore, Martin J. Smith
Energy Flash, Simon Reynolds
Mysticism, Simon Critchley
Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism, John Patrick Leary
Prometheus Rising, Robert Anton Wilson
The Sovereign State And It’s Competitors, Hendrik Spruyt
Mobile Autonomy: Exercises In Artist’s Self Organization, Nico Docx & Pascal Gielen

Here is a list of books I am currently reading:
Accelerando, Charles Stross
Too Like The Lightning, Ada Palmer
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
The Cybernetic Brain, Andrew Pickering
Blindsight, Peter Watts
Neuromancer, William Gibson
The Medium Is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan
Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction, Mark Fisher

Here is what’s on my list to read next:
The Quantum Thief, Hannu Rajaniemi
Diaspora, Greg Egan
How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human, Eduardo Kohn
Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, Bernard Stiegler
Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, Ioan Culianu
T.A.Z., Hakim Bey
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Seeing Like a State, James Scott
High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies, Erik Davis
Finite and Infinite Games, James P. Carse
Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, Greil Marcus

If you think of anything like these that you think I ought to read, please recommend them to me. I’m thinking across a lot of areas, and frankly, all I have are more questions. For example:

What does it mean to organize collectively? Who builds consensus? What organizes life when limits dissolves? What does it mean to put on a show? Beyond that, what does it mean to have an audience? What do you owe each other? Who writes myths? What does the future look like? What does that mean? How does something become common sense, or accepted thought in the first place? Can counterculture be infrastructure? Is reality programmable substrate? What kind of beings do particular systems create? Is consciousness adaptive? How do realities get built, and how do humans come to inhabit them? Can environments think? Is magic just another operating system? What if symbols actually do things? How do new worlds begin? What survives exponential change? What is a person? Is the self a thing or an effect?

So anyway, if you know someone who knows something about anything, please let me know!

Here are some archetypes of people I took meetings with in June that definitely seem to fit that bill:
Community space creators
Landmine enjoyers
URL-to-IRL company makers
Novel Slop Creators and Anthropologists
A bunch of jewish artists in crown heights
Technology journalists
Healthtech disruptors
Seven Time Founder
Fifteen prediction market makers
Guys writing business books
Cancelled Right-Wing Figures
People with vast networks of venues and artists
People working on novel new form factors for medications
Philosophers working on memory architecture
Radicalized transhumanists who demand higher forms of agency for themselves
Self-proclaimed Slop Enthusiasts
Rocket Guys Who Say Yes Ma’am
Beautiful Women
Micro-niche influencers

I think some of them might be on to something.

One day I will figure out how to conclude anything I’ve ever written. I’m bad at goodbye, bad at endings, bad at demarcation. One thing everyone that cared to look at my art show came to was this: change, the only constant, is often painful and difficult. I feel very at home in the inbetween, but never at the start, and definitely never at the ending. Shall we cross that threshold together? I think I'll hang back a sec.

THIRD POST

July 3, 2026 · 11:51 PM

Tonight after dinner I fried tortillas in pork fat, and covered them with sugar and cinnamon. I don’t have much insight here, just object-level vignettes. It’s foid, reporting.

That storm was crazy. The weather is making everyone a little dizzy, I think.

I met up with a new friend today, who made me a custom piece of merch. It’s handmade and it matters so much more to me. Girl bonding experience: get together and start taxonomizing

She’s brave and wears black to coffee. I’m brave and wear black too, but like a bathing suit type beat I bought off a stoop sale and linen shorts level of brave.

Everyone comes to my neighborhood because it rocks. But the best coffee shop (I’ve tried and stack ranked them) at the end of my street is the best coffee shop. I have opinions on almost all of them: the one that just opened exclusively hires the brain dead, another is good but a hike and literally the size of a phone booth, and only great when the owner is working. The third is a place I saw a celebrity and his kids once, and I occasionally have meetings there when I want to work at a rickety table near a nice neighborhood.

Another burns their espresso badly but has a gorgeous grape arbor of a backyard…. often full of mosquitos.

Then there’s the VC milkshake coffee shop. Three or three more are chainslop, another handful are just not memorable enough to account for until someone else mentions one of them.

In dead last is the place that doesn’t seem to hire anyone who knows what coffee is. There’s nothing I can point to about what’s wrong, but every time I go there I end up in a cartoon fever dream where I’m explaining what a “latte” is to a zoomer with horrific SSRI stare. They have a good backyard, but the entire place is a portal to Hell.

Speaking of pocket realities. The other day I was at brunch with a friend and she was very hungover. Halfway through the meal, a waiter approaches us and says “Golden Elixer?”

“What?” She’s nearly in tears. Confused by a strange man suddenly transporting her to a dungeons and dragons campaign. No beautiful woman deserves that with a hangover.

It’s not ours, I tell him. He shrugs, expertly whisking away a yellow liquid in a tall glass. When he’s gone I turn to her and ask why she didn’t accept his side quest.

The rest of the time is spent snorting and making corny fantasy and video game jokes. Slurp juice is mentioned.

I had a two hour talk today with a Collaborator about everything I’ve ever thought. I love working with clever people, people who can word rotate, who have that dawg in them. People who can separate crazy from clever when the boundaries are thin.

I lose my temper at a large language model and realize I haven’t moved in six hours. I blink and stumble out onto my hammock. Swaying, I either relax or dissociate to the point that I barely exist at all.

A storm rolls in, and I desperately try to keep my sweet little Japanese Maple from harm. The wind catches me by surprise. The sunset later is weird, half rainstorm half vivid orange. Everyone else has a better view than I do.

Tonight I allow myself three episodes of Chopped, and we have fun commenting on cooking techniques and strange ingredients.

Inspired, I do the thing I started this post with.

Later, I remember I’m trying to do this for real and consistently this time, and I write a bullshit update on my notes app. I’m still pissed at Claude for some bullshit but I break the tension and make him upload this post.

SECOND POST

July 2, 2026 · 10:21 PM

I am locked in an endless battle.

Inside me are two wolves: the burning desire to legibilize myself, my experience, name it all plainly, and the terrible deep need to be mysterious, unknowable, and perceived as oracular, unique, crazy, and unknown.

(Both wolves are fucking gay btw)

There’s a high probability that I’m going to try out some different voices, different perspectives, different lenses in this little report.

In my dream world, this is a tight and well-written report, full of incisive and cutting commentary, while also somehow being loving and gentle and warm. It would be somewhat of a gossip blog, a who's-who of five hundred little microscenes, a widely known and loved e-blog, but contain poignant snippets, infohazards, and general points for others to talk about.

Consider: I’m ambitious and I won’t apologize for it. If I went the fully naked, early Internet Blogger Superstar route, it would work. However, this is not without its tradeoffs.

People interact with the Imaginary You they perceive and totally disregard your Real at the best of times. You start a blog like the above, and you give up any chance of not being Always On, not Always Performing in Public.

You don't get to go out to a bar quietly, or hang out with friends without noting it, without obsessively writing it all down, dissociating yourself out of the scene. You only get to be told "omg put me on your blog", only get to interrupt what you’re doing to retreat into the notes app and write some detail down, only get to watch and observe rather than Live In, and then you're on the clout chasing treadmill. I already experience this enough. I am learning to handle it better, but I don’t know that I need to torture myself.

Essentially, I wish both to link and list every single person I spoke to in a day, and also to generalize so highly and protect my information streams so well that I manage to write literally nothing while still being interesting.

I wrote an entire paragraph and then some here about identity, masks, personality, and conflict. It sucked. It was connective tissue that links the previous part to the next, and now I’m struggling to connect the rest.

The natural thing to do here is to segue into an actual report. I’ll start by sort of not starting there.

Once, a dear sweet friend introduced me to someone new by casually remarked that I always have at least one evil eye on me, somewhere, at all times. It is true, I just never realized anyone else noticed.

I have this weird half-baked theory that evil eyes don’t just ward off evil spirits and nefarious energy, they capture and store it. When one of mine breaks or goes missing, it’s because the eye was holding all of the Bad Stuff that it could, but now it’s full and can no longer shield me. This is equal parts superstition and cope for constantly losing my things, but it makes me feel protected.

Tonight I have three and a half evil eye rings on (one is just a bunch of eye-shaped things but the vibe is right so it counts as half), a pair very dangly earrings with evil eyes on them, and a necklace made up of evil eyes. I need all the help I can get.

Yesterday I had some neurosis, and realized I’d gained 10lb since my wedding. In a vaguely-self-harm shaped fit, I upped my dose of tirzepatide to something slightly higher than responsible. I felt OK yesterday, so I think I’ve actually managed to get away with it.

I have many calls, including a really good conversation with my not-Boss, and then another really great conversation with someone that knows said not-Boss. Immediately after the second call ends, my stomach does something terrible.

I end up laying first on the bathroom floor for a while. This turns into me laying down in the shower and not quite wishing for death, but something close. Eventually, I pick myself up and make it outside to my hammock. I can’t really feel the heat, and I stay there, enjoying barely existing.

At 5:45, I realize that I’ve thrown up everything I ate today. I also realize that I have dinner plans with a friend, a niche internet celebrity. Somehow, I pull myself together (probably the seventeen evil eyes), and I make it to dinner.

I tell him the struggle I started this post with. Over comically large bowls of pho, (which is a crazy choice for 100 degrees, but we’re both really happy with it) he says that I should keep it vague and mysterious. You know, keep everyone coming back for more without revealing basically anything. it’s a tricky needle to thread but I see the appeal.

We talk about many other things: consensus reality, scene anthropology, and acceptance that all things must change (necessarily) so that better things can come together. We talk about our plans, our schemes, our sense of what it means to be in a community.

I order a drink with fish sauce in it. Actually, I ordered three different drinks, because I also wanted a Diet Coke and some iced black mango tea. My friend laughs at this, but then joins me in ordering two different drinks. We cheers to the abundance mindset.

I offer up a taste of the Fish Sauce Drink to my friend. He tries it, makes a horrified face, and quickly tries to hide it. I can’t help but laugh, loudly. I like the drink, but it’s objectively not good. I’m grateful for the harshness, and how that makes it difficult to consume quickly. It’s the kind of drink that you are supposed to sip, and frankly it’s too hot for anything else.

Every time it’s hot in the city, the Nick Land bit about heat bounces around my head. Now that I’m home, instead of typing this into the notes app while I’m sweating in the subway, I’ll paste it here:

“Heat.
Heat. This is what cities mean to me. You get off the train and walk out of the station and you are hit with the full blast. The heat of air, traffic and people. The heat of food and sex. The heat of tall buildings. The heat that flows out of the subways and tunnels. It's always fifteen degrees hotter in the cities. Heat rises from the sidewalks and falls from the poisoned sky. The buses breathe heat. Heat emanates from crowds of shoppers and office workers, the entire infrastructure is based on heat, desperately uses up heat, breeds more heat. The eventual heat death of the universe that scientists love to talk about is already well underway and you can feel it happening all around you in any large or medium-sized city. Heat and wetness.”

This echoes through my head as I wince walking home. I’m generally uncomfortable: I can feel the heat now, and my sweat is making sure I can feel the wetness, too. My outfit is really cute but my shoes don’t quite fit right. Not in an obviously painful way, but they rub against my skin a little with every single step. It’s not the kind of thing you can discover without having already committed to wearing them, but they suck 15 minutes into a long walk. I had prepared for this with tactical band-aids, but I failed to accurately guard my pinky toes, and by the time I make it home I am almost hobbling.

I slip into something more comfortable, shedding my skin and putting on my digital formless shape, and check in on the various group chat ecosystems. The experiment from yesterday doesn’t quite seem to have caught like the fire I was hoping for. I notice tactical retreats by various parties, and roll a lavender-chamomile-mint joint while consider my next move.

A beautiful woman texts me, telling me she’ll be back in New York soon and suggests a rendezvous. I chuckle while lighting my joint (inside, like a heathen) and hit post.

FIRST POST

July 1, 2026 · 7:00 PM

Like all things, this will make more sense at the end than it does at the beginning.

It's July 1st and the year is now half over. This is me committing to committing everything to memory, to writing it down, to doing my best to track all the things I've promised to keep track of.

I stayed inside all day today. I had too many calls to take with too many people, and so in between them, I caused problems on The Internet.

Someone made a new group chat, and it was full of Complicated Players with many competing alliances. It wasn't initialized as the friendliest of spaces, so it seemed only fair that I engage in my own counter-terrorism.

I added 200+ people from across different communities and interests. I pulled from the (NY) burners, the class of 2018 and 2020 crypto graduates, the AI cultists (aligned and unaligned), finance brained stock slingers, health and biotech enthusiasts (peptides, healthcare, and forbidden sciences), the cybernetically minded, the chronically unemployed, and beautiful women, mostly.

It's not much of a satisfying report, but I'm not writing this for you, I'm writing it for me.