h. Play

‘was reading Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden (1973) this summer after reading Gillian Anderson’s Want (2024).

First of all,

And then,

But! After the turn on and hot fantasies, it is very interesting.

It was published 50+ years ago and despite everything that improved in western sexual culture (for lack of better term), all the inclusivity,  the freedom, women are still not sexually that free. It is still so hidden and weird. It starts early:

I mentioned in an earlier chapter that I think a woman’s divorce from sex begins with her childhood exclusion from adventure and exploration, both physical and mental, and those limited, limiting toys and games allowed to her. It’s as if it were a crime for a young female body to get knocked about and bruised in play, as if the crime were in the contact of anyone or anything with her body. And the feeling that it’s a crime to be touched, even by herself, increases in her teens, so that if she stumbles upon it by accident, the ground for guilt has already been prepared.

We still prevent young girls from doing what young boys do that is, enjoy your own body and stretch its limits. Jump as high as you can. Smell your armpits, toy with your genitals. It’s still in 2026, kind of a thing “boys do” and “girls do too, but kind of shouldn’t because uh we don’t know lol”. It is still not clearly “your body, yours forever, use it, cherish it” for all. It must be absolutely confusing for preteens. We set women for eternal confusion/guilt right from the start (I can’t even imagine the religion added layer). Nancy goes on:

If her own hands are hesitant to touch what’s obviously and tangibly hers, how much chance does her mind have of exploring the possibilities of that body? And where would she get the rudimentary material her imagination needs to build with? What books or magazines offer any more than her childhood toys, incentive or ideas for sexual fantasy concerning this body that’s so out of bounds?

Yo no sé. And the plot thickens in today’s world. Young girls have smartphones and check porn, I imagine. If you’re a 12-14 year old girl excited about things you see in porn in your own privacy, how do you deal with it? How do you feel, is guilt super strong? Are you willing to talk about it with friends? I imagine that it’s still difficult and risky. Society is extremely ambiguous around women’s sexual freedom, despite a skyrocketing sex toy industry and the common understanding that women are just as sexual as men. But it’s not fully acknowledged. It’s fucking bizarre! It’s the result of patriarchy’s little hold left. But that hold is actually super strong.

By the time she’s twelve they’ve got her senses all tied up: Nice Little Girls don’t do “those things”; Nice Little Girls also don’t look—thus the fig leaf, just in case they do. And as Nice Little Girls don’t even think about those things, even the fig leaf becomes a mystery. Later, when the mystery is solved and the fig leaf removed, women look (at least some do), but they still don’t speak. The conspiracy of silence that began with her mother, and which makes each woman her own jailer, keeps women verbally tongue-tied and as securely blocked off from their minds as their minds are from their bodies.

Even in secured group chats today, girls probably are not saying everything like boys have been instructed to.

No one wants to know, to hear, or to talk to her about it—she’s “not old enough,” the subject’s is “not nice,” and she knows that hearing about it would make Mummy “nervous”—that much she does know. All this only makes the forbidden bits of knowledge more provocative. And so these thoughts join the other odds and ends of exciting, sometimes disturbing sensations, daydreams, the other secrets she’s been accumulating—or repressing—while growing up. By the time she’s stopped playing with dolls, during that long lull before she begins any meaningful contact with boys (I don’t necessarily mean sex), she’s got enough powerful imagery packed away in her head to staffer the horniest writer of the most exotic porn she ever found in her older brother’s room.

I had never thought about that. This checks out with how adult women often talk about sex so elusively. Half a century later. smh.

The contrast with boys is immense. At the same age we’re supposed to start “chasing pussy”. The preteen stage for boys is when ejaculation starts being a reality and we’re supposed to let that energy consume us, making us real dudes or something. There is zero guilt for us. There shouldn’t be any for girls.

My favorite excerpt from that book, a woman writing to Nancy:

I don’t pretend to know what makes people work but I’d be willing to bet that if more people were more open and let themselves go during sex, their brains as well as their bodies, the world would be a better place. I doubt that so many people would be so aggressive and power-crazy if they found a suitable sex partner who would accept all of them. If people could free themselves of deep-rooted sex guilts they’d spend more time becoming good lovers and wouldn’t have so much time for revenge and wars. Good sex makes my husband and me very mellow. Who would think of hating and fighting and plotting to get someone else if they’d just been very sexually satisfied, no matter what means they employed to reach that happy goal? Not many, I’ll bet.

I truly believe that too. First, men’s entire goal in life is to get rich to have sex with whoever because if you’re rich, you can have sex with whoever you want. Men’s culture is still that narrow and corny.

From Epstein to Mazan, men are still on that stupid “only us are horny, women are holes, let’s pay and let’s go”. Which is fucking insane and dumb as hell.

A society based on free sexual movement wouldn’t be about depravation. I think it frees one to have great sex whenever. It allows great focus on other tasks, there’s no wandering.

We need this to develop any next frontier stuff. If we ever do, we can’t go to Mars with the state of our sexual culture. That would be erroneous and suicidal.

The choices we make about AI now are critical | Bill Gates

Through my day job, I have access to the latest models. They keep getting better. They are really much better than 18 months ago. I predicted that data optimization and improvement might allow this.

Now we don’t know how far we can get, but it’s getting scary/exciting. And exhausting.

We need a new society model. Right now.

In a capitalist society, employment is the way most people get the money they need to pay for the basics of life as well as being a key source of dignity and social connection.

That is all over. In a capitalist society, companies use the best tools to produce what they need to produce. People truly compete against a 24/7 slave that will never get sick or pregnant, and who’s also getting better all the time. There’s no competition here. We’re getting decimated.

This would be the worst possible time for humans to lose their critical thinking skills. In an era of deepfakes and misinformation that can be tailored to you individually, the ability to tell what is true from what is not becomes an essential life skill.

Oh, that essential life skill is fighting for its life. Social media has already spent 15 years making people’s critical thinking skills an ersatz of what it was. Almost no one born with the internet and smartphones has the capacity to think critically. They’re all parrots. The hivemind has taken over. It is horrible. I suspect AI companies are kind of cool with that (future $$$).

This issue cannot be resolved without a new society model.

As people who spend their lives thinking about what it means to be human, religious leaders can play a key role in this.

Absolutely fucking not. Being human is being what we are now, doing what we do. Religion is the least interesting or important thing in today’s world. We preserve our humanity by keeping it simple. Respectful. And democratic. There’s no need for religion, which only brings conflict, in there.

The highest priority is a monumental task: creating a domestic and international framework for dealing with AI.

The task isn’t about AI, which is AI-ing well. The task is  international UBI. The task is new society model, due to unprecedented automation push through AI. AI is like a wild horse that we cannot really tam at the scale of the planet. Capitalism has always been a wild beast, and that’s how it functions best: by being free to do as it pleased. That’s how we got those incredible gains on so many fronts, for decades: capitalism and innovation. We cannot contain them. We need to protect people (UBI now), and let the wild horse run.

Something in the care they gave my dad was irreplaceably human. No robot could or should have done it.

That’s understandable, but that’s romantic. My foster mom has Alzheimer’s as well and a robot taking care of her 24/7 in her own house would have been much better than being patient #526 in a retirement home with humans who can be good but also not good at all because it’s a job to pay bills, first and foremost. With a robot I would get automatic daily reports on her health, the robot would have never let her fall like 10 times in two years, I would talk to her every single day and she wouldn’t be as affected by the decease because she would still be in her home of 50 years instead of a place she doesn’t know, full of people she doesn’t know either.

I believe that as AI and robots improve, we’ll set aside certain things for only people to do. I’ve started calling this domain Human Reserved, and it’s an example of the kinds of ideas we’ll need to consider.

Capitalism doesn’t work that way, Bill. The second a machine can do well something a person does, everyone in the world switches to the machine. Ask the sex toy industry. This is the past 100 years. Again: we cannot compete against a 24/7 slave. My dad keeps adding features to his custom software and needs less people than ever to output more. The dynamic cannot be changed by creating exceptions. That will only enable conflict and unfairness.

As workers are pushed into different jobs, they will need retraining and other support from the social safety net. But they will be working less, which means they will be paying less in income taxes, and government revenues will drop just when the demand for those services is greatest. The funds will have to come from somewhere at a time when budgets are stretched.

This is bullshit. Governments literally create money! When a company says “I need $100M right now” and asks a bank for a loan, the bank doesn’t have the money either and asks the government “I need $100M worth of bonds right now” and the government creates that shit, out of thin air. Boom, here’s a $100M, please pay me back in the next 60 years. That’s how money is created. Checks and balances are an afterthought. The US, France and Japan combined debt today is 53 trillion dollars. 53,000 billion dollars. No brain can parse that number. Who will pay? No one knows. Shouldn’t those countries face enormous sacrifices already? That’s not what it looks like. It’s hot, but no one is burning. Economic debt is pure BS.

My point is, the classical economic view that Bill grew up on, that Boomers believe in, does not exist anymore. Taxes to raise money is some 1900s paradigm that hasn’t worked in a while. Today and moving forward, just give money to people directly so that they stop scheming and doing stupid shit to make money, like starting idiotic businesses or betting on phones. That’s what needs to happen. And people scream “that’s communism!” if you share money created by massively automated systems and I’m all like “how tf you care so much about naming something? Irrelevant ass shit”. Make something work, and let it be. If people choose to use that income to drink to their deaths instead of investing in themselves and in good times for a long time, let it be. If that allows tons of people to heal, let it be because that is progress.

While I was typing this, a new GPT came out. And it is apparently, again, a massive improvement?

UBI now y’all. It is obvious.

Old car outside:

Old car inside:

New car outside:

New car inside:

So, yeah. Big change.

My 1999 old car’s engine was starting to go awol at traffic lights, stalling to zero noise and back. Probably a small piece to change but as its MPG is bad, and that my mechanic was like “I’m afraid your lil shitty ass car is not interesting to nobody”, it was time to go ahead and upgrade a vehicle. 500 miles shy from 100,000 miles.

The 2023 Haroldmobile is such a massive change, it is shocking. Switching from RWD to FWD is so great. Sticking to the road like glue.

The wild thing at first was getting used to the hybrid car making zero noise at traffic lights. “Oh God not again I just BOU right, electric mode he he”. This happened more times than I’d like to acknowledge, but whatever.

The absence of constant vibrations when driving is both fantastic and something odd. There’s no physicality with the new car, outside of the wind with the windows down.

I was driving the old car. Feeling it. Looking at its needles move predictably. “Launching” it to use momentum to pass a hill.

Now I just zip through things. No noise. Just gliding effortlessly, listening to the sound of my music sounding better than ever.

I pilot a 2D spaceship full of beeps and boops, robotic voices and telemetry tracking my ass. I used to drive a small truck without a functional oil gauge. X-wing VS Millenium Falcon.

It’s dope and weird and kind of sad and exciting at once.

I read that book recently and it was good. Interesting things to me about him:

• Grew up in a house where folks read. A lot.
• He loved reading about everything.
• He also read everything he could about technology.
• Fascinated by the possibilities offered by computers.
• Focused on what the future could be (what should exist but doesn’t yet?).
• Highly interested in possibilities and opportunities (what if).
• Loved Blaxploitation and Jimi Hendrix.
• Taught himself the guitar at 16 and never spent a week without playing, until his death.

I feel close. I’m not the co-founder of a trillion-dollar company, but I grew up quite similarly and I’ve been doing my own thing for sure.

At some point in the book, Paul says:

“It was 1967 and artificial intelligence was the hot theme in science-fiction. […] I closed with a prediction: “In fifty years, a robot with a fairly large brain cell capacity will be within reach”. Today it appears that I was highly optimistic. With 2017 around the corner, we’re still not close to match the abilities of the incalculably complex human brain.”

Paul passed away in 2018. Less than ten years later, the best AI is so good at so many things that it is literally making people pause about what the world is going to be in five years. We have no idea.

AI in 2026 does things that seemed absolutely not possible in 2017. I wish Paul had seen this with his own eyes and I wish I could hear his predictions. This man could write hand assembly! He would be so blown away, crying.

Lots of interesting things in the book like how Paul coined the name Micro-Soft, how important documentation was to the business, or how Bill Gates was making $2.25/hr programming in 1975 (software wasn’t valued much back then) or how involved Microsoft was already in 1979 in Japan (I had read how game programmers were hitting up MS in the early 80s to get help).

An interesting point compared to today’s tech business, is that no one was trying to “get rich”. They were all in “how to sustain a business that is ours, so that we keep doing cool stuff the way we want, and drink colas all day” mode. How Microsoft became a behemoth and made thousands of millionaires and a few billionaires, is secondary. First came the pride of making something useful, sold fairly. Nothing more, nothing less.

The fact that today’s tech is relentless in making people addicted, weakening people mentally, abusing every single skinner’s box tricks, makes it truly look like a nightmare compared to those early IT days of hippies in Albuquerque.

I am nervous in the morning taking off to my little village to see her. I know what she currently looks like. I know retirement homes, their smell and their lines of inert corpses in wheelchairs in the hallways, put there so that they can enjoy some sunlight and watch people move. That’s better, more human than TV.

It’s summer rain and heavy, warm weather.

I am nervous in the car with my half sister, half cousin who never left the area and who’s been taking care of her the most in the past few years. I know it’s going to be hard. It’s Monday afternoon.

We quietly walk into her room. She’s watching TV. Her kind of hard stare, the one you get once you’re in a retirement home, half mad, half understanding, slowly gets mellower the closer I get to her. She instantly recognizes me, her first and only black kid. Her dry eyes are slowly filling up with liquid as I softly take her hand in mine and give her a couple kisses on the cheeks.

She then proceeds to never shut up for the next hour, which is a sign of very high activity. The last times they had come to see her, she wouldn’t say a word. I brought her a patisserie and she’s eating some and then goes back and forth between saying that she can’t eat it while having spoons of it and putting it on the side for later. She talks about how she was going to her parents’ house (both long gone) last month, she talks about how someone stole her dog (a plush) probably over five times, I stopped counting after that.

At some point, I clearly see her brain trying to make sense of the fact that I’m with her, here in France, which means that I should be with her in her house, but that she herself cannot remember when the last time she was there (almost a year now) was. I can see the darkness in her mind, the clouds making her frown. Trying to understand and explain what is going on and how I can be here while she cannot say where she is. I think she kind of still thinks she’s temporarily in the hospital. It is painful to watch.

Then the very racist diatribe happens. I knew it could, not because she’s mean, but because she has no filters anymore. And she says those things to somehow protect me. Prevent me from becoming a negro except that I am one. Again, I see her brain trying to make sense of the situation, what she said and what she knows. It’s all slowly heartbreaking.

Her voice is as strong as ever. She says things only she says those things that way. It’s about the cadence and humor. She still hears very well, even when we try to whisper. We’re three generations sitting on chairs around her. She would like to walk but her muscles are atrophied because she’s not moving because last times she tried, she fell, again. So nurses put her in a chair almost 24/7, and that’s it. She has a giant scar across the forehead and her arms are all flabby now. Her butt hurts from all that sitting.

After a bit over a hour, we leave. I hold her hand again, give her kisses, tell her to take good care of herself. She replies “sure will, I’m not trying anything else!” I cannot tell how she is actually doing.

I just know it’s getting closer.

Back from a one-week trip to France. Longest trip in 10+ years. It went well and it is emotionally so dense in my head. It’s always intense.

I saw my parents. My sister and her husband. A bunch of cats. Burned France. My foster mom in her retirement home room that probably will be where she leaves us. I passed by her/our house which is not hers anymore and she doesn’t know it and I know it too well and it hurts. I saw rain and violent storms, of course. I saw good old friends, kids and cousins. I went back to my ol’ apartment in Paris suburbs for the second time in a decade. I picked up my bass amp because I don’t want dad to mess up his back getting it down from the 3rd floor without elevator.

Due to jetlag and French culture, I feel like all I was doing was eat delicious food and poop constantly, at random hours. But we also did some heavy yard work. We moved about 4,000 pounds (2 tons) of discarded oak beams from construction that will be repurposed. Oak is like gold for my dad. He highly respects wood. I also unscrewed a billion screws from oak planks that will be sanded and used again, as new. I also slept in a van next to a 2CV. That unique ass car. Sigh.

Sipping on a homemade latte in my LA crib after a week without one, jetlagged as hell. Slurping as much sun (vitamin D) as possible to fight the COVID ting from travelling with all those hoes without masks.

Working relentlessly. This week was a bit hard with this humid heat.

I momentarily gave up on 3D, it’s really insane. But I’m making progress with models. I’m making furniture (not that easy at that small scale), I finished the roof so that I can use a sponge filling to make it as if it was a green roof. More like a yellow roof because grass will probably be yellow most of the time.

I’ll paint some red dots of flowers and it will look like spring in SoCal.

Financing is moving forward as well, and that’s a bit of a relief. I was ready to buy some land early this year but they put it off market so I’ll be back, mfs.

Thankful.

I missed her so much! She is back.

I had predicted that looking at how hard she plays defense, she was going to get hurt. She did. She was out for a while.

I had also talked shit about the fact that she didn’t shoot the 3 well and then she said shhh.

Well, this week she was back, shot twice, made them both. They were threes.

The first one early in the game. Late in the game, she made a defensive move (deflection and steal) that basically sealed the win. And then she made a perfect 3. You know, shot so pure that the ball stays levitating in the air right after hitting the net. Like, you cannot do better. Pure perfection.

That’s her face after that shot.

I hope she’s having a good time in Chicago. AT-DB-DC at the Sun was a whole vibe.

Internet comment:

I’m just so frustrated by how quickly and easily people give in to these things. People face relatively small inconveniences and quickly give away their rights. Smart phones and social media (in large part, enabled by always-on, always-present smart phones) have so, so many negatives effects and people won’t even consider moving on. “It’s hard to find parking” or “some restaurants are now inconvenient to eat at” are measured next to “the suicide rate of teen girls is spiking” and “we’ve enabled government tracking and surveillance on a scale never before thought possible.” I don’t know how else to be. People are so obsessed with immediate impulse satisfaction and immediate comfort that they’d give up anything. I think if you offered to remove someone’s right to vote, but told them they would be able to gamble for free once a month you’d lose half the votes in the country.

I think hyper, ultra-convenience short-circuits our brains.

Once on that “I am a god and just talk or tap to get anything I want”, people don’t want to go back.

Self-discipline blown out of the water.

Except that the entire juiciness of life is in the balance and oscillation between joy and pain. Effort and rest. Comfort, and discomfort. Struggle and mastery.

Once on that god shit, your brain doesn’t do anything. And so it atrophies. Or reacts violently against a change from doing nothing.

I’m keeping a line. I stay on the slightly inconvenient side of life to keep the smell, the taste. It feels stupid sometimes. But it always leads somewhere, to something, someone.

Ultra-convenience makes you rot in circle. Self-discipline makes you travel distances.

I realize that I’ve been able to avoid the mobile duopoly thanks to living in California/US. Anywhere else in the world? I would have been fucked years ago.

You can do everything with sms, email and websites here! To this day. Maybe it’s because those companies are all based in CA and know damn well how they’re making the world weaker and more sedated that they haven’t pushed state legislation around that. Or because people have pushed against it. Waymo might be the only service where I need a GoogApple app (I can order an Uber with a phone call). Hopefully they make a call service too.

In any case, I am very thankful for that freedom. I love that local businesses have responsive, simple websites and that I can order with the quickness from my laptop, typing with a nice keyboard that springs back and is felt under my fingers.

This is how it should be. Digital, respectful, and a bit slower.