4/30/2025

11:37am

Books are one of the greatest bulwarks against kleptocracy and authoritarianism because they hone focus, attention, and can imbue a mind with the calm required to take clear action: Qualities required by a society to "win." To be reductive (and somewhat alarmist): The feed, the doomscroll, the hyperventilation, is the heartbeat of political and social death. It is not life. It is a false heartbeat. BEWARE the feed and what it makes you do and think; cultivate the clear mind. (Please, for all of us, cultivate the clear mind.) - Craig Mod

A book is always a book. A book needs no battery. You make a contract with a book and it holds up its side of the agreement, to be a book.

4/22/2025

9:35am

You can't be an impostor when you're being yourself; sharing your insights, anecdotes. This is what differentiates our favorite storytellers from generic journalists. They tell their version of something in a way only they could.

9:25am

Our technology, particularly AI, follows in the footsteps of our end-result-oriented culture. Mistaking output for throughput. We never arrive in life, all we ever have is the moment, the effort the sisphysean struggle.

4/21/2025

9:50am

I realized today what these electronic devices draw most of their power from us.(This relates to the physicality of analogy devices that Craig Mod talks about)

4/17/2025

5:55pm

On the same side of downstream effects of social media, electronic, fast media evades reflection time. It's that other piece I want to write about, the radicalization of Elon Musk, how these platforms encourage, enable, supercharge that. It's also becoming so clear to me how much this type of media environment fractures people's attentions, conditions them to seek solace from any moment of discomfort, how much it changes our ability to do the deep reflective kind of thinking that is essential for us to be better angels of our nature.

1:34pm

The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. - B.F. Skinner

11:05am

Inspired by Craig Mods meditative photography, and as such a visual person, I'm considering adopting photography again. I'm drawn to the idea of developing trust in my aesthetic intuition, being able to articulate that in photography that shows how I see the world. With the added benefit of developing an eye, an openness, an awareness of all that world and all the polarity and themes of man versus nature that I see.

11:00am

Transition times are integral and sacred to a calm, full life. Mise en place for changing locations, activities, reading, watching, task transitions.

10:59am

I see an increasing number of people wearing headphones or staring down at their screens doing their day to day activities. There's seemingly no downtime, no time for reflection, no presence. Less human-to-human connection, less and less people that are actually doing activities that aren't mediated by some technology or device that requires our attention and (but thats because of the business models behind these technologies)

4/8/2025

9:47am

Will the internet and culture follow the same cycle of gentrification (see Channel 5 Mexico City Video) as the physical world? Will it follow the same descent into meaninglessness, or will it devolve into a deeper black hole of irrelevance Because it's not confined by the same laws of physics and scarcity as the real world?

This really speaks to the growing importance of curators and collators, (cultural observers) in the future that will help separate signal from noise; Docking at these individual's islands after floating around in a sea of junk and irreverence.

7:19am

Referencing the Sapiens graphic novel and its explanation about human cooperation beyond Dunbar's number of 150 requires belief in shared fictions or mythologies, and when you understand that getting groups of people to believe in the same thing whether or not it's true or moral you'll see why Donald Trump and Elon Musk have gained such prominence and following and it shows the danger of unchecked proliferation of information and data through social networks that when not constrained by laws or agreed upon social norms in a very insidious way because it increases engagement on the platforms and this misinformation proliferates.

4/7/2025

7:03pm

How do I take, meld evergreen notes, logs, sublime, AI and turn my site into some type of actual second brain that helps me surface emegent themes, concepts, ideas, sentiments, patterns; group, filter, search, link them.

I want my writing to be more evolving, less buttoned up, less perfectionist, but I want to develop a system that encouragse me to share them semi-publically, seeds that can grow into evergreen notes.

7:00pm

Not everything I write should blasted as a standlone newsletter, I can send a collated newsetter monthly with options for the reader of stuff in the garden to pick from (logs, dispatches, notes)

6:59pm

Our quest for convienience will kill our culture.

4/2/2025

8:02am

It's a trip that nature is a novelty to us now. Like how I was surprised when I saw a whole family of deer up in Sierra Madre. How in our quests for comfort and control we've eradicated species, interactions with the natural world. And how there is this visceral longing in my soul to have these magical experiences; to hear birds singing to each other, or to watch how bees communicate with each other by dancing, or study how ants share chemicals to find food.

4/1/2025

10:50am

An good essay is volley between questions and answers. The overarching piece, the subsections, the individual paragraphs all partake in this play. While writing, I've begun to ask myself, "what is the job of this paragraph? What question is it trying to answer?" Looking at piece as a hierarchy of questions trying to answer the main thesis.