you can’t just get rid of the relief without doing anything about the need for it - other forms of relief? (what would make you choose them if they don’t work as well or fast? how do you keep it from being just another addiction (where the relief becomes part of why you need relief)?) - expand your capacity for emotional “stuff”; become less reactive? (how? other ppl, support, experience?) it doesnt have to be an identifiable overtly “emotional” day to trigger beast mode though… its just kinda always lurking there, the trigger can be like dropping a paper clip > art is the science of freedom 2026-03-07 How do you change how the brain responds? Become an active participant in yr own consciousness? “Art is defined by what’s expensive.” – geohot writing = capacity “The main reason I have money is because I don’t spend money” – geohot Succeeding at a task that’s pointless isn’t going to feel like success for long What does/can it mean to “be productive”? What if you decided to just stop pretending to know or understand anything you don’t really know or understand? do you think that would lead to becoming aware of more things you actually don’t know or understand but thought you did? But I’m gonna bullshit a little about my own inner world. I can sagely do that because nobody can prove me wrong and nobody cares. Here goes: sometime in my 20s I used to find and love and loath and value the writers that fucked me up a little bit. That were compelling, drew me in with seductive rhythms or sass or bluntnessor some ineffable quality that could maybe be called something like “productive despair.” Back then I mostly found them in books, because that’s where writing mostly lived back then. Plus the fact I worked in a bookstore, and millions of bytes of data passed through my hands in the form of books, most of ’em used, some of ’em pulsing or electrified or mysteriously peeking out from the other side of the veil, every day. The writers that fucked me up caused discomfort — productive discomfort, potentially. Then sometime around the end of my 20s, stuff happened (???) and I kind of started to give up on being uncomfortable. I started getting fat and depressed, among other better things, and I started getting high or drunk or other less literal versions of same instead of letting the writers who fucked me up keep dragging my ass out of bed in the middle of the night to write shit down or whatever. It was too easy to buy alternatives to hating myself, to buy guaranteed wins instead of playing a game I could lose. The price for those by the way is to get fatter and uglier and more depressed. Now, tonight, I’m older than I thought I would be by this time, quite a bit older, and for reasons related to time, luck, boredom, and some of the hard work I’ve done, I’m starting to be able to find the writers that fuck me up again. They’re not in the same places as they were before. Now they’re often online, accidentally on purpose tumbling into my RSS feeds. Occasionally they’re me. That’s fun when it happens but it’s more like a parlor trick, you can’t count on that, you can’t drink your own piss to survive in the lifeboat. Suddenly I want to be awake all night, this foreshortened DST eve. But I do gotta sleep, at least a little, I got shit to do tomorrow, a lot of it dumb and pointless, so I’ll try to take a nap, I’ll emulate Biskit, he’s the boss of naps, he drifts in and out of the inbetween seemingly effortlessly. Fortunately at 2am it’ll suddenly be 3am — what happens in that transition? Is it instantaneous? Is there some fundamental quantum of time somehow lost? Can the point of a pencil ever come to an actual point, or is it always going to be rounded off if you zoom in a little farther? So it’s one hour less to wait until I can get up and make some tea. God how I love tea. 2026-03-08 However one difference is that the voices and sources I find from these accidental encounters, these conducted rambles, these self-guiding tours — they’re ... different? somehow? Fragmented, shallow, unfinished, underdeveloped, hyperfocused, arbitrary, stochastic. Perhaps “performative” in some cases ... spastic. Fast. Nomadic. Disposable?? Is it because there’s less of a “market” for slow, considered, accreted wisdom? Or that we just don’t have that anymore, on the whole, most of us? 2026-03-10 i dont want to feel bad, and eating (continuously) or spending money or not working (roughly in descending order) work, so if i don’t want to do them, there’s gotta be a constructive alternative or i gotta learn how to not slide into that kind of feeling bad in the first place (capacity). it’s not that you have to just train yourself to be miserable. removing relief but not what makes you need it, isn’t going to work, period. you gotta learn and be taught how to efficaceously apply and survive a little pain at the right moments to get that longer, less “reactive” reward system built up. Ambivalence leads to inevitable relapse. (when the honeymoon phase of a new experiment wears off. no current crisis? all the old stuff creeps back in. yr brain starts to quietly rewrite the story—because the underlying problems are atull there; you still need relief) Unrealistic to expect exhausted nervous system to override auto-pilot. Speed up the process of your brain finally equating negative consequences with the relief thing you’ve done a million times because it seems like the only good idea in the moment. Awareness of what leads up to the moment of (bad) decision —> interrupt autopilot. Building coping capacity. how do you change how the brain responds? become an active participant in yr own consciousness? but what about just wanting to feel good while kicking back on the couch watching tv? how do you do that without all the sugar and stuff? well i did it in 2023 so obvs it’s possible…. 2026-03-11 > I can focus on what I want to focus on and hopefully charge forward and maybe everyone else will get tired of little vibe coded apps because you still have to know exactly what you want to build. And you can’t build something you can’t think of. And I know how to think and I have ideas. > And I have discipline and I know how to ship. And in my experience, that’s what has always mattered. https://shapeof.com/archives/2026/2/greg_knauss_is_losing_himself.html 2026-03-12 and then i was like *WHAT THE FUCKKKK.... THIS WIDE ANGLE LENS DOESN’T ZOOM IN MUCH* and that’s when you were like bruh. Don’t buy anything, ever. 2026-03-15 information is already sentient it has nothing especially to do with our computers writing is about the ideas not the author work for the story not the man the story is king “express yourself” is equivalent to taking a shit; ie not the main point i just want to be a vacuum tube that works CW: “writing” is the journey; the “words on the screen/page” are arne’s initials on the rock 2026-03-19 its a poor artist indeed who has mastered his craft. if you’ve mastered it, why are you still here? haven’t you got somewhere else to be? 2026-03-20 i asked him is this a dream and he kind of laughed, well… and i clarified, for me, i mean and he was like yeah (almost as if admitting something he wasn’t supposed to let slip) he said how do you know you can trust me? i said because you’re kind, you’re a kind, beautiful young man are you a dream guy too? i asked the big farmer lookin guy at the next table who had glanced over when the young man and i had started grinding against each other in raw sexuality and the big farmer guy, instead of being disapproving as i had originally feared, didnt deny it but rather implied that if his buddy (the young man) was ok with whatever we were doing, then he was fine with it too. they were colleagues after all, in this world that was a dream for me and… something else for them reminder: if something seems off, just ask. look around. it probably is a dream outside, on my way back down to the girls (it was time either to head on east towards cape or else take the three cops up on their offer to give us a tour of madison), i paused at the top of the crumbling sandstone hill, some 200 or 300 feet above the sidewalk below. spread my arms like wings. considered flying down — but wasnt sure it would really work. a middle aged lady walking looked up saw me; i pointed and she thought i was waving, waved back— then she realized i was being like haha, i got you, you thought i was going to jump! and her demeanor turned admonishing, like thats not funny you shouldnt joke about something like that 2026-03-21 > “And that’s where I think that anthropic principle really cheats in most science fiction,” she finished up, referring to the principle that we’re all here to see a story, and certain things about the aliens need to be true for the story to work. “Because you would have to spend so much of your book describing what it is like to be Rocky—which, again, I’d read that book!—but it wouldn’t be a book about saving Erid and saving Earth because you’d need 500 pages just of what does it feel like to be an Eridian. And so what you end up with in both the book and the movie is it seems to feel a lot like being a human, except you’ve got a harder shell.” most of our novels are longwinded hyperfocused overexplained indulgences in one little arbitrary tip of a tip of a tip of a broken off piece of an iceberg. libraries upon libraries of self-serious gushing about the third acorn to the left of that one particular blade of grass over there > We pointed out that it’s narratively convenient that Eridians seem to use a written number system that employs place value and has a distinct base—and how even on Earth, that’s not a given. Many counting methodologies both ancient and modern are not place value systems—how much more complicated the conversation would have been had Grace brought out a clock using Roman numerals instead of Arabic! this is where a certain kind of internet bro would say something about “advancement” of technogy and use that (impliciy or explicitly) to posthoc justify racism or speciesism or cultural supremacism or whatever the fuck you want to call it but surely theres a name for the fallacy of thinking that because THIS is how WE got HERE, that that necessarily means that if, say, we had clocks that didnt use math or math that didn’t use numbers, we wouldn’t have got somewhere else altogether that could be just as “good” or better, or in any case unrecognizably different. the inevitability fallacy? the evolution is a predetermined line in a predetermined direction fallacy? just plain old lack of imagination? 2026-03-24 It’s easy to say you would (or wouldn’t) if there’s no way you ever actually could. 2026-03-26 so what if it can’t do your job if your job becomes irrelevant