040325 That rule about time estimates where they say double the number and go to the next unit, so like if you think it’ll take two minutes it will really take four hours? The time it takes to change your life is the opposite of that. I said my job was easy and yet I’m working on day four and a half of not being able, literally not being able to force myself to work on it for more than an hour or two a day, max. I guess it’s partly because my guts are being ground into mash by worry and grief over what is happening to this country that I happen to live in. I guess there’s other reasons. 040425 > Dopamine influences whether or not we are willing to put effort into a reward. > EXAMPLES > quitting drinking would help me stop hating myself VS I don’t want to go to 1–2 meetings a week, think about sobriety all the time, or never drink on vacation ever again > going to the gym would help me feel less depressed VS I’m so tired, I won’t even have a good workout if I go, why bother > cooking salmon would definitely make me feel proud of myself and nourished VS I deserve pizza, I worked hard all day, I can’t cook after all that what a chore! So for me, that looks like: Working on my school work would make me less worried about the future & less self-loathing as a professional VS schools are bullshit, education is fucked, grades are evil so my decision to fuck off just shows how sensitive and true I am so getting fired is probably better anyway If I don’t want to do this job I could start really working on finding or creating something else (like when Nancy was talking about making writing workshops; what she was envisioning sounded very similar to drum circles!) VS It’s not fair that this system is so fucked up and they’re lucky to have me because I’m smart and insightful enough to see that it’s fucked up and they should all support and comfort me while I’m doing a shitty job because of how fucked up the system is so I’ll stay here and expect to get paid even if I can barely stand to sit down at the computer, but it’s not my fault, so I’ll stay in this in between land and be constantly worried and miserable. > In sobriety, we are learning to care about our own lives again. Some of my clients are solo drinkers who come to me perplexed with why they don't drink around their family anymore and they hold it together at work (if they're still working), but they still sabotage themselves when they are alone. Sobriety is about caring about future us and making decisions that prioritize that version of you. Yeah that was basically me. ---- bill b recommending hypercard, and why it was disappointing (cf “[the main problem I’ve found with generative AI, and with “vibe coding” in general: it completely sucks out the joy of software development for me](https://nolanlawson.com/2025/04/02/ai-ambivalence/).”) ---- 040525 if you were designing yourself, is this how you would be? 040625 billboard: “If you don’t love your job, change it” NR: if we work for employers, let’s ask small businesses what they want are you a professional? no, because if you’re a pro then you have to do what the people with the money want what’s the alternative? what are you doing if you’re an amateur? I have a friend who said “text me when you get back,” and I havent’ because we always drank and smoked when we talked. should i tell him why i keep hesitating? it’s not just that, either. for some reason, reaching out to a friend falls in the “low dopamine high effort” side of my current baseline gill said you can shift your baseline by practicing; you don’t have to conquer it all at once 040725 > The prime mover is that information itself. We better watch out. We better ask questions about what it’s doing to us, and not just assume that because we think we invented it we’re in control and it’s for our benefit — because I don’t think it is. [Susan Blackmore](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-frN4fbsrDs) ---- What’s one way you can take care of yourself, honor yourself, or be true to yourself — something that you don’t get paid for, don’t get a grade for, nobody’s telling you have to do, nobody necessarily rewards you for, you don’t necessarily get attention for, and it isn’t something you have to buy — Untold misery isn’t that much fun when it’s no longer an intellectual exercise. The people on that trolley aren’t amused by our philosophical posturing. People say STOP DOOMSCROLLING, well BITCH THAT DOESN’T MAKE THE DOOM GO AWAY. 99% of my job now feels pointless and fake; when it was only about 90% I felt like I could handle it pretty well. 041025 we need the thoughts, the memories, the unknown, not ever more subtle or clever or *current* refinements of the medium/message. i don’t want to work on being or sounding cool, or like a maverick or a renegade like my hair is feathering back in the tuff philosophical breeze. nobody cares. least of all me. i want to spend the rest of my (sapient/sentient) life studying life? 041225 moving into the needed or desired technology is a solvable problem. If (for example) LLMs are becoming part of what we consider the broader purview of “writing,” OK, we can expermiment and learn. The bigger problem is the unanswered question: I don’t know what we’re actually trying to accomplish! like at MATC: they still had us do some conventional cut-and-paste (literal) film stripping and stuff like that, trapping by (physically) inserting a layer of transparency to make the light spread, whatever, the old school way of doing things — maybe it was partly because they still had the equipment (lol) but we started out the first semester that way, and the rationale was “understand what the new tech’s metaphors are referring to, so you’ll understand what you’re trying to accomplish and why we make certain choices” etc, etc. It was kind of smart, I think, a way to probe the shifting boundaries, mentally (and physically) map out the domain space by getting acquainted with the limitations of both the old ways and the new ways. But so like with English classes — what ARE we trying to accomplish? With printing, that’s easy: we were trying to accomplish printing stuff. But what the fuck is high school for? It doesn’t get it’s driving force from the *production* of anything — except, what, “prepared young people”? Prepared for what? Why? Is there really ANYTHING quantifiable, measurable, confidently justifiable about anything I’m “teaching” these kids? I think I could teach some things, I mean I have values and some experiences and some opinions that I *think* aren’t based on complete nonsense, but — what? What are they supposed to be able to DO? I know, I know, we have “I can” and “students will be able to” and all that bullshit, but the phrasing of those is so wishy washy and vague astrological and outdated and open-ended that it’s really not much help, other than as a retroactive rationalization for the lessons we wanted to make anyway, either because we think they’re fun, or the kids will maybe actually do them, or it’s what we are familiar with, or it’s what we can get away with, or it’s what’s easy. The “standards” are so abstract as to be useless. They do seem to have a subtext, built perhaps on some sense of “civic duty” or “community norms” — but again, they’re so open to interpretation, that’s not much help either, and reinforcing social conformity for the benefit of management is hardly what I’m motivated to sharpen up my pedagogy for. Critical thinking. Knowing who to vote for? IDK, man, I really don’t fucking know, and I shouldn’t complain that my job is bullshit because at least it’s easy, but lately it hasn’t even been easy. I haven’t been able to make myself sit here and do it. That could become a problem. Is it possible I *do* know what we’re trying to accomplish, but either (a) I don’t think I’m up to the task, or (b) I’m not really interested in it? 041225 yes and why do we need to quantify what our students are doing, anyway? it’s all so circular ... to test them! so we can give them a grade! could it be otherwise? if learning is repetition with feedback, then as a teacher you would need to have some insight into what they are understanding and how their understanding is changing. I would think this would work best in a mutually engaged, organically evolving teacher/student relationship. The heirarchical dichotomy is probably not even necessary, at least not rigidly, right? That grades are a form of currency seems to poison it, or if you want to be neutral it definitely *changes* the nature of the feedback loop. It becomes more about what the student can get away with, or how they can satisfy the measure with or without having gone through the intended learning process. does a real learning process have to be the intended one? I don’t think so. You learn what you learn; what you’re “supposed” to learn is a sidecar; ask any college dropout. But I still feel as though we’re constrained by our expectations, by the monetization of grades, by weaponization of our shared fictions... So like with printing. at a particular moment, we felt we knew something about what the product represented. You came to this building, you manipulated these materials, you operated this equipment, and here’s what came out. We could evaluate that. Congratulations, you now knew how to do something. Was production of, say, an essay ever so unambiguous? You read some things, we had conversations, You took up this writing instrument, a reader within the appropriate context could see evidence of *some* kind of process, right? What’s the point of remotely assigning the production of an image if the student could either, hypothetically, print it the old fashioned way, take a digital photo, copy something from the internet, or prompt a generative AI? We still can point to something (sort of!) and say “this is the product” but does it tell us anything about the process? WHY DO WE CARE? If we don’t care, if the separation from that particularly identifiable class of products from the finite, reducible set of processes means we’re no longer confident in saying “you know how to do this thing THIS PARTICULAR WAY” then don’t we HAVE to ask ourselves WHAT IS THE VALUE OF BEING ABLE TO PRODUCE THE THING? If it’s a thing we need, there’s value in producing it, but suddenly the range of skills that need to be learned has gone off to left field and we’re over here making up rationalizations for why we’re still assigning essays. IF the actual product of having produced an essay is “having had some kind of mental or communicative experience” then — how the fuck would you quantify that anyway? You wouldn’t — you would share, you would discuss, you would have fascinating conversations, you would inspire each other to learn more, you would make organic connections, you would genuinely, spontaneously help each other learn, cuz that’s what real live alive excited people do with each other. Maybe an essay isn’t (was never) a product. Maybe it’s more like a marker, a referent, a precipitate, a souvenir? say you “buy” something someone wrote, you didnt, you bought a stack of paper with ink plus a shared fiction; you bought an ineffable instantiation of a digital ritual -- click the download link! -- plus a shared fiction; you bought an nfc but any old copy is just as nfc-ish as what the popular press has called an nfc -- only diff is the momentary variation of the shared fiction actually maybe you didnt even buy the shared fiction. you spending money and sharing in the fiction are not connected in the way we might habitually imagine is authorial intent important? the distinction between our tooks and ourselves (ostensibly the tool users) is artificial, even misleading as the medium is the message, so is the tool the consciousness Where in all this do we get “You get an A which means you get to go to this school and prob’ly get a good job, but you get an F which means good luck, hope you can get a job near the bus line”? As a teacher, I am complicit in the diamond-mine-ification of the divine spark of shared human consciousness. If I didn’t need that measly 60k, I’d quit tomorrow. No, fuck that, I’d quit tonight. ADDENDUM JUST BC AI IS MAKING US FEEL LIKE WRITING IS USELESS, THAT DONT MEAN WRITING WASNT USELESS BEFORE either all life (information) is sacred or else none of it is there is no me -- beyond pattern recognition: let’s call that particular semi-stable temporarily sustained pattern of information a “me” yabut who’s the “‘s” in “let’s,” dumbass? that’s easy: another pattern what’s the substrate, what system is running this game of life? uhhh.... i gotta go, call me, we’ll talk, let’s do lunch..... BYE 041325 god, too much “thinking” just makes you skittish! mike gave me a Galaxie Deluxe in exchange for giving him back the orange Coronet Electric (which I woulda kept except for the double-letter-reluctance problem). He’s set me up to meet with Skebbas in the Germantown PD parking lot this wednesday, to look at that blue and white 2200. “Sorry, he sold all the typewriters” his had told his ditzy receptionist to say. What an asshole. I never did like that guy. Not a real typewriter person at all. I read somewhere that his dad was, that was the real typewriter guy. Ha. Why lie to me? Why not just say he put them all on Facebook? What a fuckin schlep. Well, he doesn’t know that I know that that’s where this fucking typewriter came from, but $35 — it might be ok. Even though I know there is no chance in hell it’s going to be Classic Elite, let alone Elite. So yeah, how’s work going? 041425 I take [this post](https://anandsanwal.me/the-proof-economy/) from Sanwal as a suggestion that an answer to “what are we trying to accomplish” and “how will we know what they understand” (setting aside the ultimate WHY for the moment) is unanswerable by US unilaterally, and rather should be decided by THE STUDENT, with guidance, encouragement, and support from us. It’s still an incomplete answer, of course. Still doesn’t address how to engender and nurture survival strategies other than enshittification at the hands of soulless corporations. I guess if you have to work for a school, you may as well keep up with how to actually help kids be prepared for what’s waiting for them after they leave said school. Otherwise, truly, what’s the point? But — do you have to work for a school? ---- 041825 > You can have a conversation with the news... > Nikita Roy its not the sum total of human knowledge but it plus humans is greater than the sum of the parts its not that this kind of knowledge is shallow and inferior; its our brains doing what theyve always done: hosting patterns. the patterns morph. > AI turns news into a conversation. TEACHING TOO MAYBE??? > it does a really good job (talking abt conversing with Perplexity to understand topics) But if its feeding us bs and becomes predominant, how would we know if it ISNT doing a good job? diff between feeling smart/informed vs being text that talks back did we invent or discover has it always been frozen or dormant *or has it been talking all along and we are learning new ways to listen* teaching why do i get to choose the starting point say we have a convo with tewwg, whats my role in it, whats yours and as always: how do i know what grade to give you (because school aint about conversations its about money) and: WHO OWNS IT (us) it seems adverserial right out of the gate. what will it look like if i want to converse with AI about, say, revolution? who controls the black box? can we bust it open? pandora? you there, sis? seems like maybe the most intriguing computet thing since personal computers, but woz could phreak phones with off the shelf parts, parts that didnt have an opinion either way who has their grubby opinions all over this thing that may have the power to shape reality then again, we’ve always had to “trick” technology (on purpose or by happy accident) into doing off label things, for artistic or other reasons. examples? Finder became my enchanted realm, for one. the nature of technology IS tricking the parts to astonish us with unexpected functions, right? the layers of that build on themselves, just like language, just like consciousness or “intelligence” but -- and maybe the evil overlords were always a problem but i didnt consider it so much when conputers popped onto the scene , because i was a kid with no real problems -- but what about the evil overlords? how do bust up *their* looms but keep for ourselves the new weird powers of weaving? ---- So I bought a logitech keyboard because I forgot to bring my other keyboard, meaning i spent twice as much money as blah blah blah. Well, what are you gonna do, am i right? I am - sugar is a drug - buying stuff is a drug - I quit alcohol but I have a long way to go if I want to get sober. ---- children. offspring. so helpless. so strong. theyve made my life rich, theyve left me impoverished. theyve invaded my home, theyve made it a home. theyve been the impetus, theyve left me exhausted. theyve taken over my life, theyve been my reason to live. accidentally on purpose: the truest love ---- 042025 ## today’s non-negotiables - sobriety - start early - sugar is a drug - society is addictive - do something with your body that makes it feel better - do your job or get a new one with each of the people in your life, you’re fake in a different way the continual interaction of all of our fakes adds up to reality kids have to learn that adults have feelings too and that that’s ok my dad didnt plan it that way i didnt plan it this way (feels like the worst case outcomes are so much more gruesome now tho) 042125 ## today’s non-negotiables - stay sober - start early - society is addictive (eating is emotional; sugar is a drug) - use your body in a way that makes it feel better - do your job or get a different one *corollary:* do or think something other than revelling in how miserable and depressed you are 042525 dreams of elevators again this time plummeting below ground level but you could still see the outside, then sideways a period of transition again 042625 If you don’t buy anything, you might have some money. You might have more than you immediately need. You might be able to fold some into savings, as a hedge against when the alternator goes or the brakes or one of the kids has an emergency or the house breaks. Right now, you don’t have money for anything. Nothing better happen to the house, because you can’t pay anyone to fix it. I am obsessed with how the K5 creaks. Didn’t really pay any attention to it before, and part of the problem is I’m not even sure if it was doing it before. Somehow that’s a bigger problem than the creaking itself. What difference would it make either way? | it did it before | it didn’t do it before | |:--|:--| | something made me start noticing | i did something to change it, or it wore out | | i can’t really do anything about it | i can’t really do anything about it | Like, what, do I think I need to know if *I* made it start creaking, so, what? I can promise to never do it ever again? I mean, if the shit was that fucking cheap to begin with, what’s the damn difference? All that teaches you is that basically everything you buy is disposable garbage. What’s the point of buying shit if you have to be perpetually gingerly and paranoid, or just don’t even use it in any meaningful way? Ships, harbors, all that shit? Really, it funnels you right back to this: **JUST DON’T FUCKING BUY ANYTHING.** That’s really the best all-around rule to have. Kind of the best one since *get sober.* It has multiple benefits: 1. you might have some money left over 2. you won’t be constantly hounded and haunted by the perpetual regret, agitation, and disillusionment of having saddled yourself with more disposable garbage, the acquisition of which was a brain-virus-addled low-effort high-dopamine attempt to “feel better,” and then you never feel better, in fact you feel worse because it turns out it’s not really low effort, it’s really high effort because of all the brain-virus energy you pour into the pursuit of perfection and perfect control, every. Single. Time. So yeah, that’s a good one. Don’t buy anything. Period. You don’t need anything anyway. Except consumables: gas. food. maybe ink every now and then, paper, that sort of shit, although half the time you already have a lifetime supply of those things too, if you just look around. Clothes? Sure, occasionally, at a thrift store if possible. But on the whole, the initial response, the default reaction is: don’t. Just don’t. Should I buy — ? No. The answer is no. It’s simple, really. It’s not moralistic, it’s not complicated, it’s not self-loathing, it’s not philosophical, you don’t have to calculate it every time, it’s just a nice, simple thing like breathing. God I love breathing. I did quite a bit of breathing while picking up trash by Menomonee River with Libby this morning. Felt good. Lots of people out doing it; sweeping over an area that was covered with trash and leaving it not covered with trash, and nobody paid anybody anything. Well, they did have some nice donuts and stuff at the fold-out table that was supervised by someone’s nice old mother in law. Her son in law was the one who drove the F350 slowly down the trail collecting all the garbage bags. There were 8 tires and at least one somewhat major appliance in the retrieved pile of crap too. Gradually, the sun came out. It’s cool to see something that would be overwhelming for a single person to do, and then be one of the multiple people that make it happen. The less stuff has to mean stuff, the more the mechanical iteration of stuff that doesn’t have to mean anything can eventually accrue into some kind of meaning; the meaning resulting from this process is orders of magnitude more flexible, astonishing, intriguing, and shareable than the kind you individually intentionally philosophically make up or force from the get-go. Fragments make ecosystems where laborious “artistic effort” might only make mediocre detritus. Therefore, I like to live in simple, animated nouns: Cel’s in a bad mood, melancholy, because of changing relationships (Sierra, Libby — different ways, different reasons). Her highly attuned emotional intelligence sometimes weighs heavily on her. But I think she’ll be OK. Mom sent a picture to the group chat of bluebirds and bluebird eggs at the conservation center. 1. Stay sober 2. Don’t buy anything 3. Do the thing or don’t do the thing, but don’t not do the thing. Last night I dreamed a hispanic or possibly indian young man was cutting my hair. He started gently kissing my scalp in a way that under normal circumstances (getting a haircut in real life, for example) would likely be considered not at all correct, but in the dream I decided to let it happen, and it felt really nice and tingly. Everything I conclude or assert or declare or describe or infer or analyze or express will eventually be shown to be wrong in some critical way; so why bother. Mediocre detritus of artistic effort. Instead, ripples, pebbles. Specific sun glint off mirror or mica. One window, one brick. Snapshots. Jpegs. Ball points. Haircuts. Coffee, any way you like it. Conversation = when you learned how to open up your computer program to input from the outside world, that would then affect how the program would run. Splat, splat. I am rain. It’s up to you if any of these raindrops means anything. I worry about the kids a lot. Sometimes I compromise on my own comfort or even integrity to try to assuage the worry. Like jumping in the car at the drop of a hint. Or buying them a pizza. I don’t want to drive them around all the time, but I feel like indulging them is going to make them and me happier but ultimately it really isn’t. It’s not like they even try to manipulate me; they just ask and I almost always say yes because I don’t want them to think they’re not loved or that I don’t want them around. I just want them all to be happy so I can be happy. That’s pretty selfish. Plus it doesn’t work. I can’t control the whole pack emotionally anyway. I need to let go. Then I’ll be more available for the real parts that really matter. That’s my theory today, anyway. We shall see. I ate my banana, peanut butter crunchy granola bar, and rasperry squishy bar, and I still feel like eating snax. Out of snax. WIll go soon. Bussed here, will bus back. Might walk a bit first. The brain virus coils up again and makes me aware of the sound of the spacebar on this logitech mx mech. Then it wants to take me down the road of thinking about keyboards and perfection again, which is — it’s not — the brain virus wants nothing less than my whole entire brain. Some days, it gets it. Not today. 042725 then there’s also the “animals behaving unexpectedly” category of dreams that i get during times of marked change. Last night it was there were parts of the ceiling and walls falling off our nice funky old apartment; while i was worrying about that and trying to get a good picture to send the landlord, a bunny kept getting in the frame of the picture, along with grass and outdoor looking backgrounds. the wall behind where this was taking place was glass. the bunny was inside. the cats were both chasing the bunny, then a snake was chasing the bunny and the cats, then the bunny’s mom was trying to get in through the glass door to get at the bunny, and finally the bunny started chasing *me* and i was like, ope, nope, i don’t need rabies, and i woke up this happened after, on a different floor of a different funky old apartment, i was hugging laurie from half price books because we almost had been maybe about to have sex, but there was so much sadness and grief we just stood there holding each other, thrumming in the potentiality