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!!
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.
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)
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 —
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.
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.
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.
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.