Cȯsꭑọ ∴ ọꭑƨȯƆ @cosmiccitizen@schelling.pt

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.

So you can just sit down and plan appropriate, relevant, available responses to any anticipated outcome, eh? Still feels like a trick.

It's hilarious to watch this felon conspicuously cope for being level 3 literate. I'd explain what that is, but it requires turning over a page, so it's kind of unfair to the chuds.

Read books. It's cheap, it makes your life better, and the worst people in the world will have meltdowns because of it.

I hate having to set up my opinions with disclaimers. It's a practical necessity of society but it is fundamentally a flinch away from the emotional truth.

Iconoclasm: negative-sum, finite game (you run out of idols), reduces believers to suppressing surprise out of fear of loss.

Evocation: positive-sum, infinite game (always more theo-cucking to be done), elevates believers to cultivating surprise out of hopes that the gods feel the allure of novelty.

And by contrast, the various angry ABDs, adjuncts, and community college faculty can all go on substack and give free reign to their inquiry.

CS Peirce, the patron saint of all hyperpsychic fail-son cranks, recreated metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, information science, etc. from the position of being a freelancer.

Likewise, I think that there's probably the most exciting, divergent, and generative brew of ideas happening at the angst-filled lower ranks of the academic class. People who end up on the tenure track at top-tier schools are really smart, and I don't want to take one whit away from that, but they have also had to bear the pressure of playing the finite game exactly perfectly. Their research agendas suffer from an invisible self-impairment due to the self-veiling that they have to undertake.

My sibling used to say that we should have the valedictory address given by the lowest-ranked student who nevertheless managed to pass. That student surely knows more about what the school is really like -- in its self-concept and ironies, its cruelties and its tendernesses -- than the valedictorian who has won a finite game.