Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

"By modernity I mean the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent." ~ Baudelaire

The Internet has passed directly from world-ending Ice-9 to world-renewing ekpyrosis without pausing at any intermission on a temperate world-to-be ended.

2013 vibes: The Internet is Forever; anything you say to anyone you say to everyone; and the captains of industry are one masterstroke away from locking you into hyperreality forever.

2023 vibes: The captains of industry cannot stave off ketamine psychosis forever; Web2.0 collapse is so immense that Google may exhaust its strength saving web infrastructure; all these poasts lost like tears in rain.

It is kind of bizarre that the use of external objects as weapons should be so rare among living things.

When I talk to Friend A, I can hear about her feelings. When I talk to Friend B, I am reduced to audience for her handful of new and exciting self-diagnoses and am supposed to be a clapping seal for her every self-destructive decision.

I don't talk to Friend B anymore.

Friend A: sad about the way she has been treated by the people closest to her -> gets her shit together and changes her station in life -> finds new people

Friend B: suicidal about her disappointment in her own status -> treats everyone around her like shit -> gets bailed out by her mom -> restarts life with a heavily curated social circle that support her delusions of grandeur

You really, really want to be Friend A

It is much, much better to be sad / sorrowful / disappointed than to become psycho while avoiding those feelings.

In my view, it is better to be American than anything else. I would rather be American than anything else. And that's all that it is for Americans -- America and "anything else."

Democracy, Jazz, Pragmatism, and moonshots. I, for one, really like being American.

In 2015 when I learned that Alexandra Kleeman had done this article on bedrest I got really mad for reasons I couldn't understand at the time. It only hit me today that, uh, I have seen what this should be used for and it's not a lifestyle intervention for the idle speculation of some writer on her way to the Rome Prize.

https://harpers.org/archive/2015/12/the-bed-rest-hoax/

My 8th grade history teacher had exercise anorexia and she is the only person I've ever personally known to have been prescribed bedrest. She was pregnant and she was going to lose her pregnancy because she was still running at the track to try to keep fat off.

The Infinite Player cultivates surprise in the Genius and from Nature as the spontaneous source of novelty and futurity.

The Master Player of Finite Games veils surprise as a method for performing a Theatrical script.

Cutting-edge stuff here at Cosmo-Civic Research Corp
(not a real part of my life, I just wanted to see what priors ChatGPT has been trained with)

The death of birdsite just made me think about how grateful I am to have had that little wormhole of culture. I interacted people from around the world that I never would have, otherwise, and in some cases it was literally rewarding. It definitely feels like the kind of thing that smartphones are supposed to be doing: exchanging short notes on the global Memex.
It's not every day that we get VCs to fund a digital commons that is as horizontal as birdsite.