h. Play

It’s not the part where it’s your “third place”. It’s the part where you’re not you anymore.

Expressing yourself is fine. It’s the other side that’s unhealthy: consuming other people’s thoughts for hours means you are not thinking for yourself. You have a thought and boom a TikTok now lives in your head instead of your own thoughts because you searched for something about that topic.

That is creating armies of drones. True, counter-culture kind of died in the 2000s with globalization and late stage capitalism but still.

These days to conform is the end result of individual use of pocket computers because everyone is watching the same things and have to be like others. It’s heartbreaking because personal computers were invented by mavericks, hackers and hippies who wanted to empower the individual, unleashing creativity and whatnot. And it did that, for generations.

But now it just creates drones: people just roaming around neck down on their devices, obsessed with fitting in.

Because of phones, living with the results of other people’s thinking is encouraged, and very efficiently funneled to today’s 20-year-olds, the decade where you’re supposed to fail and go back at it, where you’re supposed to do all this well, work to become you.

Now we got boring drones with poor analytic skills. Not a fan, y’all.

And yup, the people who created this paradigm are the first human beings who grew up with computers. Who were supposed to be “creative” with them.

It be your own people. Always.

(for you my young friend, one thing to do and sustain: detox by not using your phone.)

FLW’s Westhope is on the market. $8M. Current owner bought it for $2M in 2021. Massive sigh.

No doubt a masterpiece, well restored and taken care of. Almost 100 years old (built in 1929).

Clerestory windows always kill it with natural light!

Not a bad way to wake up, I’d say.

It’s on Zillow and it’s awesome because there are 50 pictures of a house that used to be very private; there are almost no pictures of inside of it until now.

Oklahoma has been historically a state very open to modern architecture, I discovered. Check out the long list at OKCmod. Triangles, domes, pyramids, earth-sheltered houses, official public buildings or private homes, OKC has been relentless in experimenting with architecture. Love to see it.

(this is one of my favorite: horizontal, tight, floating, half a company and half a skate spot, fabulous)

But for those three days in the Illinois summer, they were young, wild, and crazy. And by all accounts the wildest of the bunch was Utah’s Alan Kay, a guy who was so far out in the future that not even this crowd could take him seriously-yet so funny, so glib, and so irrepressible that they listened anyway. When it was his turn to give a presentation, Kay told them about his idea for a “Dynabook,” a little computer that you could carry around in one hand like a notebook. One face would be a screen that would display formatted text and graphics and that you could draw or write on as if it were a pad of paper. The Dynabook would communicate with other computers via radio and infrared. It would be so simple to program that even a kid could do it. And it would have lots and lots of storage inside—maybe even a hard disk!

M. Mitchell Waldrop in The Dream Machine (best book on Personal Computer history ever).

It is July 1968 and smartphones are science-fiction’s science-fiction.

It is now May 2023 and people are addicted to their “Dynabooks” to the point of using them while walking, driving, sharing a moment with others. Where I live people walk around completely disconnected from their environments, eyes on screen, noise-cancelling earphones in ears, bumping into garbage cans and human beings. I don’t feel great about that.

Software developers are using all the casino and slot machine psychological tricks to get people glued to their phones. It works beautifully. Folks are intensely monitoring meaningless numbers instead of just being and progressing.

We still haven’t hit the bottom. Generations raised on Dynabooks, violet LED bedroom lights (the ones that completely suppress melatonin production, which protects you from cancer) and long COVID will not have a good time in their 30s, 40s and beyond.

Oh boy.

Sigh.

It was bad. Three attempts, text messages, a perfectly valid and clear address that never fails. And yet, three attempts!

I won’t thumb it down though. As the meme goes now yes, there was some slavery but and that’s why I can’t give any feedback. That person was probably overwhelmed, wanted to pee and simultaneously needed to be delivering another package elsewhere in 5. 4. 3…

This was a package that got bumped into getting to me faster when I didn’t ask for shit. I hate that because I know what that means: stress over someone driving an Amazon truck, who didn’t ask for that either.

Capitalism won and I received my package and it’s all kind of sad.

A few things from my ongoing study for my future house:

• Up to 900mm outer walls for thermal inertia.
• 400mm green roof for the same reason.
• Walls built on site with 3D printer.
• Roof built off site with 3D printer.
• Honeycomb structure for the roof, with basalt fiber rebar.

Basalt is a natural material, thus better for the earth than steel (and also doesn’t have issues of heat transfer or corrosion that steel has). It is also cheaper than carbon fiber, while being easier to recycle as well.

Honeycomb structure is amazing because it’s really good at sustaining shear strength while using the least amount of material, reducing costs. Love that.

Now I need to do more calculation and thinking about windows on east and west side, and air circulation.

You mean are. They are transforming lives and labor markets right now.

Essentially, everyone’s skills are going down rapidly in terms of $ value. Overnight, most of my graphic designer friends who used to make good money drawing digital stuff,  are unnecessary. Etc.

The thing is, we’ve been having bullshit jobs for decades now! Put it another way, we’ve already reached a point where jobs are this weird, simultaneously necessary (paying bills) and non-necessary (the job is just sitting there drinking lattes) thing.

So there’s no need for tip-toeing around the fact that this technological advance, is more than significantly changing everything. It blows our covers. It exposes our bottoms. Let’s just get money directly, then.

My sister wrote back to me about GPT and it was so scholar and predictable, GPT could have written it. People seem unable to understand and extrapolate –again, GPT is young AF, imagine what it does once really optimized and specialized in tasks. LLMs are the product of 60-70 years of computerization of our world and eliminate an incalculable amount of jobs, yes.

When computers happened, it changed the world. When spreadsheets happened, it changed the world. When the internet happened, it changed the world. AI is those three at the same time!

It’s all denial everywhere, in tech as well. Mfs are either crying that people didn’t care as much for their crypto schemes (you don’t say?), or are arguing about if we can consider GPT intelligent (me: it’s a tool that solves real-life problems by typing in a box; arguing about its intelligence is some irrelevant ass shit).

I need folks to move away from that phase and harness the responsibilities that we have towards ourselves and our future selves.

Dear climate change/Nature,

My fellow Angelenos and I are absolutely OVER this non-sunny bullshit.

It’s April???

TF is you doing??? It is WET on the GROUND bro. For days!!!

IYKYK.

I’m about to start Elysion, finishing the Hades arc.

Also,

Nobody:

Absolutely no one:

Shun: NEBULA CHAIIIN