A wise person once tweeted:

and brother, my dopamine levels are HIGH. Something I have in common with many of the very high quality people in my life right now is a common sense of wanting to create solutions for everyone else with the same problem/s we have. That’s really beautiful, interesting, and a source of constant aligned action.

And what I mean by that is, it’s very possible to get in the weeds with Law of Attraction and stock spirituality too, in being encouraged to look on the bright side. Of course we have to force that, to an extent, because our medulla oblongatas are primed for snakes and fire. But then we’re also encouraged to be of service to others. So what can happen there, and I think does happen a lot, is a cope + schmooze maneuver. Hide the pain Harold donating to charity, or whatever. That’s fine.

But lately I think, and recent events bear this out, that the real juice from the squeeze is to be very aggravated about The Problem and, from there, to Create with a capital C. That’s where the magic is!

Also, it’s worth saying, The Problem is enormous, multifaceted, and likely involves Israel at some level ngl. And we’re all getting the dull brunt of that, sure, in fiat collapse etc. But each of us is as unique as a snowflake in terms of which angle of The Problem is rubbing us the wrongest.

Yeah. This is a reframe for me, because like most of us I was culturally-ambiently raised to believe that…I don’t know…we each have a purpose, a mission?, a Voice, a value to provide. And, stupidly (or, seems so now in hindsight), I was like, damn: sure would be nice to get up out of all these problems so I could finally I.D. and initiate my Calling. Like — it would be easier to know what that even is if I wasn’t so GODDAMN tied up with — what. Multiple jobs, all of them suck, drug addled partners and their narcissistic cult families, never enough money, never enough time to do what I’m actually good at or at least passionate about, the evolving question of where the fuck do I even live because my stuff is still everywhere but wherever I am, plus I’m lonely, plus I’m overstimulated around any other human being, plus my friends have even bigger problems than I do and I feel bad about that, plus plus plus plus.

I think I would have been a lot quicker to turn my attention to The Solution to my particular Problem if I had thought such a thing was possible, but I didn’t. (And no, I’m not talking about accepting Jesus Christ or starting Cross Fit. I am cult-y but about different stuff lol.) My Problem has always been that art doesn’t pay, but I can’t stop doing art or at least wanting to. And by “art” I mean creative expression in durable form intended for consumption by an audience. I can make money doing other stuff, that’s all I ever have made money doing. Other stuff.

Yeah. So, not a real natural maneuver for me to say, Oh, maybe the whole point is to have this Problem and to solve it for everyone else having it too. Like…obviously I don’t know how to do that or I would be doing it. Right?

So yes, it’s been 3000 years since I last posted, and I apologize for that, BUT in the intervening period I have figured this out. With help. Help from whom? Literally straight from God, via his cooperative components who masquerade as, you know, this fucking guy or that fucking guy. Everyone is just some guy or gal until they put the keys to the kingdom in your hand. I hope I can put the keys to the kingdom in someone else’s hand, over and over, without even knowing it.

I have entered the crypto NFT space, and everyone looks at me like I have a dick growing out of my forehead when I say “there is a major problem with real art being monetized”. Doesn’t matter, this is a show don’t tell kind of situation.

What we’ve done — myself, Brom Bresenham, and Buck Buchanan, in partnership — is launch Electric Garden NFTs, and this will definitely be my forever project. This is how we solve this bullshit that has been making me crazy all my life. Literally all my life, I’m not being dramatic.

Consider:

Importantly, no one in this ecosystem has to care about the same thing. Electric Garden doesn't need buyers to care about artists. Buyers don't need artists to care about crypto. Bitcoin mining infrastructure doesn’t need anyone to care about anything, it just yields. And the blockchain smart-contracts that yield to our NFTs such that no one involved even has to care about me personally, or the project per se.

No one has to trust anyone. No one has to go out on a limb for anyone else. Each participant can pursue the thing they want, while their participation supplies something another participant wants.

It’s perfect. It’s an immaculate conception, like Bitcoin itself. And, unbelievably, God put the three of us together (sorry, I just don’t have energy to be secular), each of us being the perfect Fighter one of the three angles that this triangle needs:

Each of us was already doing The Thing as hard as we could; and had been, for years. Aligning interests is cool; aligning psychoses is better! So, you don’t have to choose a fighter, you can choose all three with the Electric Garden NFT project.

Might be worth mentioning that I have this Sisyphean social problem where people reach out and ask how I’ve been, and then I share about xyz projects I’ve been hashing on, and then they say “okay that’s fine but what about you, what’s going on with you?” And I’m like — “…as previously stated!” There isn’t some special private Me that I’m holding in reserve. Or if there is, it’s only because I haven’t found a container for that aspect yet.

And in light of this discussion, I think that IS the maneuver I learned early, and well, representing my formative attempt to solve my problems by solving it for others too, through art. Which definitionally oriented me to the guts of the system, not its brains. Have been largely unimpressed with brains and personalities — 1 out of 5 stars negative Yelp review there. Both are kind of bullshit, to be honest.

My brain, for instance: tells itself wild stories. Half-believes them. Amateurish. My personality: a series of poorly thought out responses I will later regret, to social stimuli and vague rituals I can’t control. Anything good that does make it through is probably neither brain nor personality but guts.

What does that have to do with art? Basically the same role that Bitcoin mining plays in our NFT project. The buyers are the brain, the art is the personality, and both sort of collapse or can’t connect without the backing. The human central nervous system is the backing for everything we’re ACTUALLY up to, whatever we tell ourselves. Oh look — I’m seeking attention. Or I’m trying to be invisible. Or I’m obsequious, or I’m domineering, or I’m nostalgic about a time I didn’t even enjoy back then, or I’m hunting something I can’t define, or I’m maneuvering, posturing, guarding, playing the woman card, playing the alpha card, playing the class clown, playing the intellectual, playing the subject matter expert. Why? Because my guts demand it of me, my sense of safety demands it of me.

People complain about others being so fake, and I’m like “I’m being fake right now!” Why? Because you’re not my dog. Extra stuff is required, I’m not allowed to just lay on the floor and make little cute noises at you. If I was allowed to be real, that’s all I would do. There aren’t fake people and real people; there are real human central nervous systems leveraging infinite strategies to unlock the next level of okay. And, possibly, there are demons or aliens masquerading as humans, I’m actually not ruling that out.

But back to art being, on a certain level, a solution for both the individual problem and the one you suspect others might have as well, The Problem is we’re fucking lonely. We’re crazy lonely. “Loners” are just people who realized it’s way less lonely than the alternative.

God really broke the mold when he made us. Like: here, enjoy this mammalian body that needs stuff, and then enjoy this human brain that won’t allow you to have any of it. Now let’s dump you all on this prison planet and — see what happens!

What do animals do? They lay around in big ole piles of companionship, when they’re not fucking and fighting and all that. What do humans do? We have our dignity, the ultimate cherry on top of our shitfuck sundae. ‘I need help but if I allow you to help me, that makes me feel worse, so will resent you, but I will also resent you if you don’t try to help, but you will probably also resent me if I don’t refuse the offer of help’ — whatever, just all of that. All of that. You’d think our nuclear families would be the one definitely fine place to feel okay as outrageous Frankenstein mammal/god hybrids, but NOPE. That’s the least safe place, for most people. That’s where you learn the social world is definitely, definitely not safe. My family was great, actually, which is why I didn’t get as shut down, or only in backwards ways.

So what can get through all that? Any of that? Art can. It’s a namaste of the gut: the inexplicable logic of me honors the inexplicable logic of you, in a way that is immune to wounding your dignity, triggering your attachment issues, invading your privacy, or shutting down your cautious receptivity. Art is the “ps ps ps” of the necessarily skittish kingdom of human kitties, and it’s a constantly self-replenishing impulse too.

What I’ve learned with people is that anything is about everything, which is obviously true for me as well. My longtime blog readers are aware lol.

So that’s cool, but it’s not something that really pulls down income. There are a lot of artists who feel similarly, however they might describe it. So the thing that excites me most about the Electric Garden NFT project is, like I said before, we don’t have to all care about each other’s stuff, because patently we don’t. Now that can be the feature, not the bug. The whole world seems to be lurching along in this chronic state of confusing incentive with agreement, and vice versa. It’s dumb.

So with a few exceptions we’re using my stuff, and myself, as the prototype for putting art on NFT rails backed by BTC yield, but the point is to create a huge swirling vortex of aligned incentives that sucks in artists of every species. And in this sense, fiat collapse is finally a gift, not a curse. This could probably still work anyway, but it’s extra juiced up considering the dearth of real money creates a massive arbitrage opportunity for value+utility. Just like the dearth of genuine discourse creates a massive arbitrage opportunity for authenticity. The absence of anything creates conditions ripe for the thing.

So, I’m having an existential amount of fun with it. This is my idea of a good time.

It was crazy to launch the project at Rare Evo in Vegas, in between two hitches at work — I have a travel job on a rotational schedule, and additionally just started with a different company this season. My work time was by no means calm or restful, on either side of that bookend. I’m home now (in Florida, which is still not where all my stuff is but whatever), and I’m doing this blog instead of folding laundry. Worth it!!

I go back to work on the 29th, and then contract will be up in probably mid-October, and I will have earned — not that much money by then, actually! — and will have more runway for EG + related concentration.

I made an EG NFT update video the other day, and the project has its own growing playlist because this is something I’ll weigh in on frequently, as things move. Lots of stuff still to wrangle. Getting multi chain is necessary (launched on Cardano), raising prices at least on higher tiers is necessary, securing some investor funding is not necessary but would be nice.

I’ll locate my pearls, I hope, and do a State of the Garden address at least quarterly, when the yield airdrops go out to the holders. I think I should hold Buffy for that, as 18 of the 2500 total were “rare buffies” that unlock even higher yield, in combination with certain others. I’ve held Buffy for videos before, and she always looks like she’s resigned to her fate, which is how she looks the rest of the time as well. This is Buffy, by the way:

And, for whoever’s interested, new job is going well, or well enough. We’re a crew of three and one radiates an aura of palpable dislike towards me. For this work, people don’t need to like each other but helps to be civil. It makes my 12-day hitches less enjoyable and more draining. There have been persistent issues in my lane with other stuff too, not worth getting into but necessitating that I go to the person who dislikes me with more than I normally would. And to be clear, I don’t dislike him.

But to get on the cross shift, which would alleviate this weird vibe, I’d have to either go 26 days without work, or work two 12’s back to back, if my cross was amenable. So I’m just gonna leave it for now. They call it work for a reason, I guess.

Generally I like my (seasonal) job and was prone to thinking I’d probably keep doing it even if EG had a groundswell, but at this point…idk. We’ve sold 468 NFTs so far, so certainly not a bad start but EG hasn’t fired me from my day job yet lol.

Book sales are alright for an unknown indie, and I’m looking to do bonus airdrops to those holders with book-related NFT art, that’s another thing to stand up.

If you’d like to hear me read and talk about my books, you can check out Caging Demons commentary and audiobook-in-progress here, or Rigs Are From Mars commentary and audiobook-in-progress here.

I have a feature article in Proof of Work Magazine this month, and it’s been such a great experience talking with Marilyn, the founder. I tell you what — in this world, You Can Just Do Stuff, and I really appreciated her story about finding Bitcoin fairly recently in a sense, and developing a better conceptual vocabulary for everything she already felt disenchanted about in the normal fiat hellscape, and launching this magazine as a result. Every single article is a banger, she’s a great curator.

Despite my hostile or at least passive aggressive working conditions lol, plus all the NFT launch travel and related bandwidth, I’ve been able to keep some pressure on the songwriting / production project! That makes me happy, so happy. I listen to my own growing playlist all the time. I have plans for leveraging that with EG NFTs too, but I can’t say enough about seizing the means of production (Suno) and finally having the ability to produce my stuff, my way, with my ear and my tastes. It’s tremendously satisfying, regardless of any future placement or development.

Just for a sense of scale, here, I’ve written (or recovered from my archive of stranded songs), produced, and published TWELVE new songs since posting my last blog. Each one has represented a tremendous amount of energy and attention, which is what I love of course. Each is a creation that I am unconditionally proud of, and which I hope many people enjoy as the years go by.

The cover art for those 12:

Best performing one of those, by far, is If We Could Do It All Over, with 438 views currently. Total banger, wrote that one in 2022 and was just rotting in my computer til now, as has been the case with many.

Everything But Still, Fall, Just Shoot Me, and Synergy are entirely new songs. Everything But Still is about wildland fire, and it’s featured (song #3 of 3 total) in a little fire season / heli fueling video montage I did, which you might enjoy. Slowly but surely getting better at video editing, takes a lot of trigger time. Just Shoot Me is an original song I wrote expressly for the purpose of creating a fun modeling portfolio, which I thought might help the NFT launch directly or indirectly. The third video I worked on was Heavy, which is just a sort of video homage to my last few years in barbell lifting, using (you guessed it) one of my own original songs.

So basically I write the song, hash out a million production attempts using AI tools til I find the right one, create the cover art using AI tools as well, and publish in the EG demos playlist for listening, enjoyment, and potential future development.

My goal with the Song Stories playlist is obviously to take a deep dive into the origins and context around each song, but I’m constantly hoist on my own petard of being too prolific. Good stuff so far but a long, long way to go before I catch myself.

And importantly, in the age of AI tools, I think it’s especially important and valuable to give context. Seemingly there are two types of people: those who think that singer is me, no matter what I tell them (my dad falls into this category), and then people who think that anything involving AI means the computer did the whole thing by itself. I seem to occupy a VERY poorly understood lane, here, which is fortunately comfortable because my entire fuckin life has been a poorly understood lane. So that’s fine.

Also, for what it’s worth, there is a playlist of Electric Garden Studio Cuts, which is 22 songs written, recorded, and published before AI was even a thing, and I’m glad to have that proof that I was already doing stuff the hard/expensive way.

I started a new book, The Long Exposure, and got 5 chapters in, but then got swamped. I’d like to publish that and one more, before year’s end. Photoshoots are at a stall right now; I’ll have to do a whole ‘nother 10 week recomp at the end of fire season and then arrange a bunch of shooting, which is fine. Hoping to work with my sculpture friend around that time too, our collab is currently on like year 3 of getting pushed off. Ugh. I could have every artist in the world banging down my door but I’ll always want to create my own stuff, and NFT-ize it since I now have that definite outlet.

So yeah, just pretty busy but all good.

Circling all the way back to the beginning of the blog: get your dopamine from what you create, not what you consume. Cannot be overemphasized. And then create what solves your own problems on behalf of others as well. I think that’s the whole hack, right there. Has been for me, anyway.

Anyway, it’s time to go work out, and I wish you all the best. Comments, thoughts, reactions always welcome. If you can figure out how to get some Cardano (VESPR wallet makes it suuuuuuper easy fyi), then buy some heckin’ EG NFTs! They’re never gonna be this cheap again, I promise you that lol. Each is 1-of-1 rare art, each mines Bitcoin, what’s not to love. Take care be well xoxoxoxo

Spotify Heroes Media Group Book Interview

Amazon Heroes Media Group Book Interview

Apple Heroes Media Group Book Interview

That’s frustrating, right? A perfectly good seed growing a perfectly good plant, but I’m not in the area anymore to enjoy the fruit. Or, the lack of watering and attention wastes the initial creative sprouting.

I blame a variety of circumstances which can all be traced upstream to a disorganizing principle called “fiat”, which is essentially what my recently published book explores. In fiat, men’s efforts become Sisyphean, while women’s efforts become invisible except to the extent that we learn to LARP as men, on spreadsheets at least.

A garden is a place to consolidate effort + long time horizon for compounding yield. An electric garden is a place to do that digitally, regardless of my physical migratory patterns. Being physically un-placed in the world has been my dominant experience since childhood. I’d like that to probably stop someday, but I need an electric garden, just like I need my psychological turtle shell of home-is-where-the-Hannah-is.

Many people have reported feeling unusually home-y around me, and I wonder if that’s because I’ve become my own home through sheer willpower lol.

Home, to me, is the place where you lay around half naked, drift in and out of naps, and nibble on food as desired, and it turns out it’s possible to do all those things in more places than you might expect! Historically, I haven’t functioned well in environments where I’m not supposed to do these things. I think it’s a service. Like: why don’t I come over and totally relax in your space. It’s energetic chocolate meets peanut butter. I’m even this way at job sites, except for the half naked part.

It seems to me we can be one of two ways: intensely do a thing and then relax, or low grade constant doings, on the surface level. The surface level kind of sucks, actually. In a garden, for instance, nothing happens on the surface until it’s already become inevitable below ground. Fiat, again, hyper fixates us on surface level everything because a collapsing currency requires constant surface level vigilance. Humans have lost the knack for relaxing, in many cases, which the animal kingdom exemplifies very well.

I prefer that people relax around me, and the best way to ask for this is to relax, myself. I don’t like being around jittery people. It’s suspicious asf. Like, what are you jittering about? What is that? People who get bored are suspect as well.

So maybe relaxing is a lost art, just like consolidation + long time horizon is lost under the fiat regime. Not unrelated, wouldn’t you say? You can’t hurry plants. You can’t hurry love. You can’t hurry muscles. You can’t hurry children to grow. You can’t hurry rapport or wound healing or digestion or clarity. While nothing can really stop these things from compounding, when the conditions are right.

So getting the conditions right for compounding continues to feel most important to me, and yeah — I have a frenetic overlay of Stuff, just like everyone. It’s truly amazing, though, how literally any amount of hustle can evaporate into the volcano of time, like crushed ice. I’m glad to be the weakest link in my own life, so that I can’t actually sustain meaningless-ish hustle.

And obviously men are set up with a lot more outward-facing hash than women. For whatever differences we have, I think we haven’t taken them seriously enough, actually. And in fiat, we can’t! Women are relegated to being B-team men, under this retarded regime.

If any of this is confusing, my vendetta against fiat, either read my book or think it through, it will all click.

So yeah, I’ve noticed that in really every area of life — fitness, money, relationships, fashion, creativity, spirituality, food — there is a normative funnel for offering constant, surface-level hustle. And then there is a less visible avenue for deep engage/disengage/repeat/compound, and that’s the one to look for imo. More compounding.

But! But! To the extent our nervous systems are entrained to offer hustle and refuse relax, we are poorly positioned to even recognize such an avenue, let alone personalize it. No wonder all the Influences tend to dysregulate us, chronically.

My second book, Caging Demons (yet to be published but nearing completion) is about how barbell strength training served to re-regulate my central nervous system, making me more likely to recognize and capitalize on engage/disengage/repeat/compound opportunities in other areas of my life.

I was always a gifted relaxer — bit of a savant amirite. But I didn’t understand how much of a superpower it is, in conjunction with focused, consistent engagement. I think this is what meditation does for people too. You have to powerfully stop hustling in one area, make that the template experience, and then expand it out. Otherwise you’re just fighting hustle with hustle, fire with fire, your whole life. And that sucks.

So, yes. Those are some Sunday thoughts about the Electric Garden. I didn’t try too hard :)

In more concrete news, just treated myself to what I really wanted for my 50th birthday this morning — a photoshoot with a great photog! This guy Robert I shot with once, last year. Incredible black and white results from that first shoot, and I am CHEEZED TO ANNOUNCE that Robert said I’m obviously more muscular now.

That’s great news cuz I’ve been on that grind. That engage/disengage/repeat/compound grind, obviously. Bringing a good body composition to a shoot is important, because I seem to be chronically without my stuff. The stuff I would pick, if I was near my stuff. I mean, last year it was whatever was in the duffle bag, and same thing but worse this time. So the outfits are haphazard, but the body composition is, thankfully, not.

One overarching goal has been to get creative with Matthew Sober, notable sculptural/structural artist, for a hopefully iconic collaboration involving whatever weird shit he comes up with (I understand my part of the assignment). Life hasn’t thrown us together for it yet but it will.

What is up with all this being busy bullshit all the time? Srsly, what a one-note song. Dog faced pony soldier, amirite.

Some images from my last shoot with Robert, for reference:

Anyway, Robert and I went out into the desert, near a makeshift shooting range, and our initial site was pleasantly soundtracked by full auto bursts from varying distances. But right in the middle of our Bitcoin bra and panties chapter (this being important for reasons I hope are obvious), we were finally encroached by a van full of kids and muttering parents.

So I’m glad the little ones are learning to shoot, but Robert and I took our shooting to a different area with more saguaros, and finished up there. My modeling is haphazard, as are all skills I’m not lucky enough to practice with regularity, so it didn’t occur to me til late in the shoot to interact with the saguaros more directly — you know, that soft/spiky contrast that works so well in photos.

And Robert was fading, because he works the nightshift, and picked me up right after work. I won’t have the images back for another few weeks, and I’ll purpose those for my BTC-backed NFT project, upcoming, so I guess what I’m saying is you’ll have to buy an NFT to see the collection because this platform ain’t gonna monetize itself, but I’ll share a few of course.

If I can get a good proof of concept going, with the BTC-backed NFTs, I’d like to do a fundraiser collection for my friends who got handed an ALS diagnosis and a marriage license, in the same week (in that order). I haven’t written about it or said much because it’s too close to home, to be honest.

The bride is my best gf and the groom is a longstanding friend as well, and a combat veteran from several tours in the Army Infantry. I wasn’t aware until now, but there’s a heartbreakingly high correlation between military service, particularly Middle East deployment, and ALS later on. Obviously it’s the worst kind of death sentence, slow but not that slow, and the wedding was a beautifully tangible assertion of the normally more vague ideas about “sickness and in health”.

Love is many things, but one I most relate to personally is: being on this ride with you matters more to me than whether it’s a good ride or a bad ride. It’s our ride. I’ve had to investigate my own choices in that, after having stayed on a ride that ultimately turned fatal for my last late love, and catastrophic for me, which begs the question: what kind of hardship is the wrong sort to show up for? I think about that a lot, because…it’s a lot to think about. Probably will inform the next set of choices, right?

I did ask the bride if she’d considered backing out. Not to destabilize her, but to make it clear (I hope) that her staying on the ALS ride shouldn’t be interpreted as a given; something presumed by default. Obviously she said no, and that’s what I expected. If it were me, and that was my person, I wouldn’t back out either. Clearly, based on my past choices lol. And there’s no doubt in my mind that the groom would choose to stay on her ride too, if cicrcumstances were reversed. Two people have never loved each other more, probably. They just got together and stayed together and never wavered, not even now.

Anyway, I hope to grow the Electric Garden platform in a variety of ways, not just to serve my own purposes but to concentrate resources towards vectors that inspire me, as well.

The day before the wedding, it occurred to me to write a song for them. Both bride and groom have been long standing supporters of my musical efforts, which goes a long way for me as you can imagine. I finished my garage workout (240 lb deadlift and 90 lb shoulder press) and sat down with my computer to think real hard. I write my lyrics out in Notes app, as they come to me, and refine from there.

A bit of a tough songwriting assignment due to the, um, circumstances, but one shitty scratch track and many Suno generations later, I was happy, and the song went over well with them for sure, and seemed like the wedding party liked it as well. “One hell of a love story” is legit true, and also showed up in their vows, and the wedding color was blue, so those were some of my parameters.

Cover art based on this gorgeous image I worked up in AI and had printed on canvas for their bedroom, as one of two gifts (won’t mention the other lol):

Turns out FedEx office does a great job and fast turnaround with prints! FYI. Half the price of Shutterfly and higher quality, imo, can place it online if you’re ever in this sudden wedding situation.

Then yesterday I worked up this song:

The origin story of this is that I wrote this song in 2019 and then forgot it existed. I found this video in some random photo drive I also forgot existed, a few weeks ago:

WHAT HAD HAPPENED was, in 2019 I was goin through it with my late love (we did a lot of goin through it) and I basically got mad, wrote a song criticizing his bullshit and larger dating culture generally, sang it at an open mic, forced him to film me lmaooo, and then it disappeared into the mist because I got real busy dealing with even more bullshit.

So the first verse explores all the tacky things women do, which he had complained about extensively and used as rationale for developing his pussy predator MO. I didn’t do the tacky things with him, but he did with me. Then the second verse is a rundown of not only general male tackiness but what I had just learned was the case with him specifically — like, his whole persona when I met him was fake I guess, and he was really just working this weird shitty angle?? And now we lived together and were almost a year into a project built on what turned out to be a bit of a false premise, and I was big mad.

Don’t worry — it all got worse.

Anyway, terrible quality of this performance overall, but that’s the backstory, and I’m very very happy with the Suno result. Just thought I’d share!

You may have noticed or suspected that my photoshoots trend sexy, and I’ve loved fine art / semi nude modeling for years tbh. It’s a great way to capitalize on all the lifting and clean eating I’m gonna do anyway. But one thing I do have to mention is that my dead bf was specifically very harsh and judge-y with me about this (while living his double life and running his awful game), and I felt very shut down and shamed for years even after he died. I got called a whore and everything else. So it’s been nice to resuscitate my own propensity for sexy shoots. I get inspired by lots of things, but one constant is dunking on him in a way that I hope is tangible even beyond the grave. Twirling around in the desert and posing, thinking “Suck on THAT, idiot.” I did love him too but there’s a lot of self-rehab after loving someone so destructive.

It is what it is.

Welp, that’s a wrap. I fly home (Florida) day after tomorrow, and this trip continues to be a wild ride, and a very heart-centered experience in all kinds of ways. Love to you all, whoever made it this far, and I appreciate the read immensely.

xoxoxoxo

My friend Bird asked me if I liked public speaking, the other day during our interview for Heroes Media Group (promoting my new book) and I was said hell yes! He’s got a conference in mind that would be a good match for the stuff I’m working on. The interview was great, by the way, and I’ll post it when it comes out. Many more to come, I hope, and because the book genuinely contains all the stuff I love to think about. Hadn’t occurred to me before, but I guess publishing a book is, among other things, a way to force everyone to talk with you about your favorite niche topics ahaha.

Anyway, back to public speaking, yes I do love what experience I’ve had of it so far, and I suppose that seems counterintuitive. Most people fear public speaking. But — I was thinking about this — maybe people feel like normal interpersonal (two way) discussion seems comfy and normal, and therefore speaking to a crowd, a one way monologue seems unnatural. But yes, in further adventures of God Put Me Together Backwards, I find the former far more difficult than the latter. With monologue, aka public speaking, I can relax and focus on bringing the idea through. Enough context but not too much, enough digression into sub-points but not too much, all that. It’s like “long form” talking, really.

But with the former — interpersonal chatting, for lack of a better word — it actually feels a bit stressful, because it’s like we’re passing an invisible ball back and forth, and I’m supposed to guess when it’s my turn, guess when my turn is over, make a point or tell a story but wrap.that.shit.up.com before it’s really even off the ground — or else then you’re dominating the conversation, you know — and overall it’s just…difficult! Talking with just one person is very easy, or a small group of people I know very well. I mean, I’m not autistic (probably), but I seem to hold a minority perspective about how much of the frictional, cringe-y guess work of volunteering information is actually negated or removed entirely, in the context of public speaking. And most notably, the entire premise of it is to speak on a subject you’ve already thought deeply about, so what’s not to like?

In both cases — monologue with an audience or casual chatting — I’ve noticed a phenomenon where no one can anticipate what’s going to come out of my mouth because I can’t either — I become quite unpredictable even to myself — and so yes it would SEEM as if that’s bad for public speaking, but not really! The truth is, we always have some point, and it’s about tracing the “kinetic chain” of ideas in our own hearts and minds, they way they connect up; which may be unusual but still of interest. In a monologue, there’s enough time and space to allow that unfolding to occur and enjoy it from the inside as well. But in mixed company, there’s no time to recover or flesh it out. Anyway, two entirely different skill sets in my opinion, and I’m only really adapted for the one.

So yes — for an odd set of reasons not immediately obvious, I think that publishing more and more projects generally — books, music, NFTs, videos, whatever — will be satisfying in normal ways, but also help to move me out of the types of exchange where I’m the least gifted, and more into types of exchange where I’m more gifted. In my interesting backwards way.

Maybe I’m entering my unapologetically eccentric era!! Hope so.

Edit: I was going to write a longer blog but a sudden outburst of drama arose in the place where I’m staying this weekend (not my drama thankfully) and it was too distracting to keep blogging, with all the crying and gnashing of teeth :) That’s it for now I guess.

Here’s the blurb/synopsis:

What if civilization isn’t breaking—it’s just switching operating systems?

Hannah Pralle sees an unusual connection: Bitcoin isn’t just digital money, it’s a new grammar for primal constraint; one that teaches us how to build lasting things again. In this audacious blend of memoir, social philosophy, and crypto-cultural criticism, she argues that our ancient mating strategies, our relationship with time, and our definitions of value are all getting a hard reboot.

From “mouse utopia” to proof-of-work, from hypergamy to hard scarcity, Pralle weaves together evolutionary psychology, Austrian economics, and her own journey discovering the Bitcoin protocol is actually a tunnel between disciplines. What emerges is a startlingly original theory: the same forces that drive sexual selection are now driving technological selection—and why understanding this might be the key to building durable incentive structure, even in cyberspace.

Irreverent, insightful, and impossible to categorize, Rigs Are From Mars, Nodes Are From Venus is the book that explains why everything feels so crazy right now—and what we can do about it.

“Impossible to categorize” means I wrote whatever the fuck I felt like and then asked AI to help me pick genres and sub-genres in the publishing process ahaha. It’s a quick read, just over 100 pages, and I will very much appreciate any reads/reviews I get. I have a second book near completion which is a bit more involved, same lane but more, if that makes sense, but I start my fire season soon so we’ll see if I can get that launched prior to.

So the story on this book is simple but also not simple. Here’s the timeline:

Been wanting to write and publish a book since I was a kid.

Turns out easier said than done.

Volume, word count, ideas, commitment, voice — none of those things are an issue. The issue has been long enough stretches of focused time PLUS an organizing principle that will hold still long enough to feel relevant to me. The blessing/curse of being me is that I outgrow my own ideas as soon as I figure out how to articulate them. But that obviously leaves me hungry for ideas I can’t outgrow. So I shed manuscripts like snakeskins in the process. All of them are reasonably “good”, I suppose, but they’re discarded anyway because they become stale for me.

Funny little side note: when I worked in the Bakken Shale oil field in 2012 (North Dakota), I lived in a house with 13 other truckers and one of them had a psychic astrologer mom. He went on home time and said he would have her do my chart if I knew my birth time etc, which I was interested in. So when he got back, he gave me her rundown, and I forget most of it, but the take away is that she said, “Tell her she needs to be writing books.”

Anyway, drawing on more recent times, I became the beneficiary of a Life Experience that’s gotten stuck in my craw for about five years now that’s been demanding literary metabolism, so most of my frenetic manuscript creation and discardation occurred around that. Lots of good stuff but to no real avail; my own ideas changing too fast. Kind of a kobiyashi maru where I try to write the unwritable, over and over, feeling that there has to be some angle, some other anchor, that will hold still. The issue in creative nonfiction (my preferred genre) is that the narrator’s persona must somewhat hold still — usually not a big ask, right? — but in the case of my Life Experience, the confusion of it had a lot to do with my own perceived personas dissolving over and over, which only creates confusion for the reader.

Begin to explore what that meta-persona anchor could be, and discover that the Bitcoin protocol has become a legit organizing principle for my thoughts and ideas. One that’s big enough to hold still and be an anchor. It didn’t happen all at once, but more…gradually then suddenly. That sounds very strange to the no-coiner set I’m sure (and I’m basically an honorary no-coiner myself lately lol), but like any discipline, Bitcoin has its own lexicon, its own conceptual vocabulary. I’ve pondered it, learned it, explored it. Similar to AA in a sense, I suppose (I’m not an addict but have learned these things perforce) — AA was designed for addicts but the Twelve Steps can be applied to all kinds of things. Bitcoin was designed to be Noah’s Ark, prepared in advance against a planetary flood of trash liquidity, but the principles apply everywhere.

Start messing around with that and realize: I want to pivot and straight up write a Bitcoin book. Tried to organize that prior to the BTC conference last year but end result was marked “close but no cigar” by me, my own snobby internal editor. It’s tough, when you haven’t iterated yet, to distinguish between OCD perfectionism and legitimate reservations, but I erred on the side of “not yet”.

So, actually pivoted again and banged out a whole book that basically wrote itself, based on a previous idea: Aesthenticity, the intersection of aesthetics and authenticity. But guess what? As soon as I finished it, I outgrew those ideas.

What else could I do but write Aesthenticity drafts 2, 3, and 4, and goddammit I outgrew those as well. You see the issue here: high output, low completion.

So then I started this book draft, which ultimately got titled “Rigs Are From Mars, Nodes Are From Venus.” Total pain in the ass title, but actually very short, quick, easy read. Are the ideas fresh and original? I have no idea; I’d become so disoriented by this point, constantly outgrowing my own epiphanies, that it’s tough to say if it’s advanced or regressive or what. I can say that my previous drafts had grown increasingly academic, as I tried to cover more and more theoretical ground, such that I surrendered completely by the time this draft emerged, and returned entirely to my most natural voice and approach. It’s not fancy, it’s not formal, it’s not dumbed-down or dressed-up; it’s just a genuine capture of what occurs to me when I’m on strong enough footing with an anchoring set of concepts.

Seemingly important questions of readership, marketability, accessibility, positioning versus other works, all that — fucking totally irrelevant to me by this point. I care too much about producing a finished book, and perhaps in future works I can consider these angles as well. But for this one, it was like kill or be killed ahaha. What I mean is, all my experience has been in shorter form, and I found out that longer form increases the risk factor of me outgrowing and then discarding the idea by like 100x. Analogy would be, I can run a funny little way for short distance, but for a marathon I have to run however my body wants to run, and it doesn’t matter if that increases shareholder value or not.

Anyway: wrote the book, and immediately started another, because this first book (Rigs) so anchored and solidified the literary altitude and terrain and lexicon that works for me, that I couldn’t wait to apply it to another project. That second book is 99% done, and it’s called Caging Demons, and here’s the cover for that:

Not published yet, but soon. It will be maybe a better book? A stronger book? But I literally couldn’t have created it without this first book, Rigs, anchoring me to a framework that actually yields, and does a lot of the heavy lifting for me.

In the course of all this — and after I completed the second book I went full retard on a YouTube playlist of previously unpublished song demos, as well — I basically forgot what the hell I even wrote in this first book. We’re talking a couple months of high output autism, here. So, I had the benefit of reading Rigs out loud to a Bitcoin savvy friend on a long road trip, pretty much discovering for myself what it was about at the same time, and I was like wow! What a great book, great ideas!

Here lately has been my first real opportunity to negotiate self-publishing, as I had initially offered the project to Bitcoin Magazine and they never got back to me. That’s what I was waiting on. So fuck them, and I self-published which is actually more in line with how I want to roll future projects anyway. I don’t want a lot of friction on the back end, is what I’m saying. But it was a process! I used Atticus for formatting and export, but because I hadn’t written it in Atticus, there was some churn there, and churn creating cover art, and churn getting all the dimensions and resolutions just right, and churn churn churn.

Anyway, the book went live yesterday and it will just perform how it performs. Bitcoin is an emerging thought space, so tough to say. I’ll make six or seven bucks off whatever version people get, and I’ll promote in whatever way I can, but most importantly I’ll keep writing and publishing books.

On that point specifically, and to sum it all up, I learned that writing A BOOK’S WORTH OF WORDS is no big deal, and I’ve done it a hundred times. Writing A BOOK is hard, and it’s hard in a slippery, elusive, almost spiritual right of passage kind of way. I don’t think it will be that hard again; second book certainly benefitted from the travails of its older sibling — and a lot of that had to do with the idea of ‘what sort of author I should be’ getting crucified and cauterized, leaving behind only what sort of author I actually am. Shooters shoot and authors publish, right? If it was easy everyone would do it.

So, today is my very first day on this earth being a published author of a (barely) book-length book, and that is a big relief. I was starting to wonder if I really am just full of shit.

How do I feel? I feel like I love to write and I’m about to make it everyone’s problem, on a bigger stage. I want to be the Danielle Steele of weirdo Bitcoin-adjacent memoir philosophy books; just like “next. next. next.” There are so many ideas to explore, in the lane I’ve established for myself, and each one is fractal and yields infinite other epiphanies and connections, and I think I could write a few books a year for the rest of my life and probably not even scratch the surface. That’s the power of a big-enough and anchoring-enough idea, and that’s Bitcoin. Which sounds really weird to most, but if you know, you know.

I’m grateful to have finally achieved the right recipe for a book length statement that I, myself, am not tired of by the time it’s over. In that sense, my first book is a diamond. Might not be a diamond to anyone else, but a diamond to me because it survived and indeed was formed by enormous internal and external pressures. It’s a book that doesn’t care what anyone thinks about it, because it first of all doesn’t care what I think about it, thankfully. It’s like the Buffy of books: zero fucks.

Alright, so the second book, Caging Demons, is where I circled back from my newly achieved high ground and reclaimed the bloody dead hostages of allllll my previous attempts to write about my Life Experience; you know, the one that demanded literary metabolism but defied those craft prerequisites necessary to do so. I got rid of all the parasites and invented, again, my own genre/format: it’s an alternating memoir/Bitcoin philosophy book, comparing barbell progressive overload to Bitcoin proof of work. These are essentially the same thing, but one is for your body/mind and one is for your finances/time. This would not have occurred to me, previously, and it’s the only way it can and does work. It’s excellent, and I look forward to its release soon.

As for Aesthenticity, that’s probably the next one? Obviously I already wrote it four times but without the benefit of a conceptual vehicle that isn’t prone to breaking down. I’m actually eager to revisit this idea now, because I already know what doesn’t work, and that’s 90% of the battle. Too early to call it a sure thing, but I’m cautiously optimistic.

Oh, all the mining rigs were located, in the blazing heat and loud, scattered shipping container madness, via their extremely long tiny printed serial numbers, and drained, and loaded, and transported, and are now being tested prior to being put back online at a much better facility, for much cheaper power, with much greater oversight and monitoring. I haven’t missed a lift yet, but hit a new deadlift PR on the same day as slogging those rigs around, and it was also my 50th birthday, and it was like the longest most tiring best day ever. The previous “hosting” facility is being mismanaged into the ground, and getting the rigs out of there felt like catching the last chopper out of Hanoi. Good riddance and rest in hell.

It’s shaping up to be a good year on the Hannah front!

So thank you for reading this far, if you have, and please check out my book and drop a review if you can. I hope this context makes the prospect more appealing. I’ll let you guys know when the second one is live, obviously, and also forgot to mention I have this random other manuscript that I should just lob out like a grenade as well — it’s a long story, no pun intended, but a short fiction collection and already meant to put it out a long time ago. I’m not bad at fiction! If I do get that published, you’ll recognize Roger, Clementine, and the notorious bartender from my “Romantic Interlude” chapter in Rigs; essentially I wanted to playfully illustrate my premise, Rigs and Nodes on a date as it were. Instead of inventing entirely new characters from scratch, I just repurposed these three from a short story written previously. So the fiction collection will have that short story, which follows a wildly different trajectory than the one in Rigs.

Okay that’s it, have fun y’all and thank you for your readership xoxoxo

So quick refresh, my brother and I have about 70 bitcoin mining machines that have been been stuck under lease at a place here in Pecos with a pretty high cost of power. Thanks to a personal connection I made at the Bitcoin conference in 2025, we have a green light to move everything to a different facility with a lower cost of power and better maintenance oversight. It just happens to be my birthday, but the general idea is to get the fuck out from under this old lease asap and get the rigs hashing again under more amenable conditions. I would happily wake up in hell to get that accomplished, so Pecos is just fine.

I’m traveling with a really knowledgeable subject matter expert, who’s helping me with this maneuver and whose facility will host the rigs moving forward. Despite offering some hosting for personal friends on a onesie-twosie basis, this new location isn’t looking to offer services or attract customers whatsoever. They’re just mining bitcoin, period, scaling up as they go. The mining industry is so new that not only is there room for innovation in infrastructure; it’s a frontier, where the innovation is unavoidable and necessary. The entire ballet of minimizing power costs while maximizing output of fussy machines that run hot and constantly misbehave is, itself, predicated upon the necessity of drawing more power than almost any normal type of building in the US is set up for. So a lot of the work on the project has been negotiating with the city and warehouse facility about pulling off more power and standing up additional transformers.

So yes, we’ll be moving all the rigs there, in the next day or two. Most of the machines are immersion or have been retrofitted for immersion, which means that the rigs literally sit in vats of fluid, as they hash. It’s pretty wild to see, super counterintuitive, but the whole issue with mining rigs is their tremendous heat output, so the fluid helps them stay cool. But the fluid also requires a whole operation in its own right.

Personally, I enjoy learning more about these processes, and hope to become more actively involved in the future. At the right power cost, mining bitcoin is a great alternative to business models involving customers, marketing, inventory, products, store fronts, all that. It’s very pure, and I’m very into it.

So, once these rigs are all moved and hashing in their new home, I’ll need to return to Florida and get ready for my fire season, but this maneuver today and this week is foundational to restoring the mining project to solvency. It’s not easy to find a good host! And it’s not easy to run them yourself. None of it is easy, in other words.

I made a big push, last few weeks, on creating a playlist of songs I’ve written, more or less recently. I’ve just had such a backlog on studio production, for years, and even beyond that it’s become obvious to me that there always has been and always will be a mismatch between my high output with writing and the realistic results, with production. Writing songs and getting a demo mocked up is my favorite part, and so it’s been great that Suno (AI optimized for music production) has helped me really zero in on the part I love, dis-encumbering me from the parts which stubbornly remain less feasible. A really nice development is that a fantastic vocalist named Sarah Bethany is tracking and will be releasing two of my original songs, Move Out Of My Way and Sugar In the Rain. This is fantastic because she’s hands down a better vocalist than me, and even at my best I have more of a country flavor whereas she can pull of these bluesier, jazzier styles. Her husband is a very gifted producer, videographer, and musician in his own right, so they represent a team that can take these songs a lot further than I’d be able to. Total win/win and I’m so happy. I truly do love each of my songs, and it’s been so exciting to seize the means of production, literally, and create this playlist. I put it on shuffle and listen to it all the time, it’s just fantastic. Goes without saying, if anyone reading this has a licensing opportunity or would like to collaborate on my songs/your project, let me know. I’ve had so much fun with this, and it’s the relief of a lifetime to be able to achieve polished final versions, all by myself. It’s tough to say what’s the best song on there so far; maybe a tie between these two: Blood So Bad and None Of Your Business.

Obviously been putting some work into making cover art that’s reasonably uniform across tracks, and that’s been really fun too. Takes a combo of Midjourney and Nanobanana 2.

Using the same process, I’ve been making custom tarot cards for chapter headers on my second book, Caging Demons, for instance:

Still gotta get these standardized, but I’ve been blessed to have one reader (Frank!) and one listener (Buck!) to beta test both manuscripts (title on first book is still a little squishy, probably Rigs Are From Mars but not sure yet), and I’m working with a program called Atticus for formatting the manuscripts for publishing.

So this is the bulk of the crop from my last few months of work, since moving from Hawaii to Florida, and it’s been really great to have so much time to focus and create. The next meta-project is tying digital collectibles — these projects and others — to NFT’s that will be staked to fractional bitcoin mining yields, using my own rigs (once they’re repositioned for better profitability), using the Cardano blockchain with its smart contract capacity; and all that will need to be hosted on a site that my brother Abe is building for me, which will be the ultimate Electric Garden HQ. It’s exciting to approach the prospect of truly, logistically tying everything together — writing, modeling, music, bitcoin mining, and platform generally — in what should be a feasible and monetized endeavor that can scale. Lord knows I make enough art, when I have the time and focus. I’m actually really into self-publishing; I’ve just needed to get a viable-enough platform going. I hope to prove the concept works and then offer collaborations with other artists and friends, and friend-artists, in order to better monetize their work as well. A “label” as it were, but in a new type of space that can accommodate a broad variety of digital media collectibles.

The other project that’s gone really well has been an experiment in body recomposition, building on my already decent platform of barbell training and musculature. What I really want is to finally arrive at a collaboration with a large-scale artist friend of mine, Matt Sober, for a sort of statuary-themed project, but involving glass and lights and fluid and colors, rather than granite or marble. Obviously the most heroic feminine proportions possible will be an advantage to the project, so the last three months I ran a pretty strict experiment tracking macros and lifts and daily movement etc, and it went really well. I expected it to feel strict, but it really didn’t, and I stopped tracking macros after 10 weeks because it’s now become second nature. I experienced big gains in my lifts (bench press, squat, shoulder press, and deadlift) due to running a better lifestyle, and oh! — I’m 100 days sober today :) I don’t really give a fuck about sobriety in, like, the AA sense because I’m not an alcoholic (this is not a flex, just a fact) but there’s no doubt that alcohol is dead weight in a recomposition push, and I’ve been enjoying life without it.

So what I mean by recomposition is my weight stayed basically the same, the whole time, but with the bigger lifts, the added muscle, and the really good nutrition, my fat/muscle ratio improved. This trip I’m on right now, to move the rigs, represents my first foray into taking this particular lifestyle on the road, and it’s not too bad. Been traveling with more food / supplies than usual, and worst case scenario I can still get 84g of protein per day with just two shakes, so it’s very do-able. I’m lifelong vegetarian, and vegan except for eggs, for any newer readers.

What I really want for my birthday is a photoshoot, and I have a phone consult later today with a studio in Houston. I’ll see if I can pull that off. I was supposed to phone consult on Wednesday, but I missed it in what became a kerfuffle of trying to find a place to stop and pee in mid-rush hour traffic trying to leave that stupid city, so had to reschedule lol. The photographer called but nature called first, and harder.

Probably goes without saying, but I have no negative thoughts or feelings about turning 50. I’m happy with my barbell lifestyle, and oh — of course traveling but still hitting lifts has necessitated numerous forays to strange gyms in strange places, and the purchase of day passes etc. Buck has been a great gym bro and is currently suffering in the hamstrings area from being forced back into the barbell trenches with me, which is just great. I think everyone should be lifting, and I’m not shy about saying it :)

My family suffered a loss lately; my aunt Jane passed recently (actually my first cousin once-removed, whatever), and she was the glue that kept our family reunion going for decades and decades. She lived in Gunnison, CO, and that reunion was a fixture in the otherwise chaotic lives of me, my brother and my dad. My mom used to go too, but she became a bit shut-in in her later years and so it was the three of us, as I got older. Anyway, Aunt Jane was such a warm and marvelously intelligent, kind, gifted and artistic woman. We’re all looking forward to seeing her again on the other side. I was able to organize a song I’d written 25-ish years ago at her house, actually, during one of our gatherings, and mock up a nice demo in her honor, albeit a bit late for her enjoyment :-/ Didn’t occur to me to do it before, and I have so goddamn many songs. Anyway, it turned out nice, and it’s called Just Like You. Very early songwriting, which was arguably better lol.

Buffy is along with me on this trip, of course, and she seems to be recovered from some sort of arthritis flare up she was having? I was worried there for a bit but back to normal now, so that’s great. It lasted a few weeks though and she was even reluctant about going on our daily excursion to the park. So sometimes she stayed home, and I’d just walk with her around the neighborhood (headphones on and listening to my own playlist lol, those songs are fire!), but other times carrying her by way of various little dog devices:

Anyway seems all better now. I decided that she’s not going to fire season with me this time, though. Abe is a wonderful co-parent, she loves being home with him, and I just don’t think she’s up for it anymore, if she ever was. I really didn’t have an alternative, for many years, but I’d say it’s time to stop dragging her through all that bullshit. Actually I thought last year it was time to stop dragging her through it, but there was a terrible incident in which she got lost in the desert while being babysat. Mistakes were made but the biggest one was me not attaching an AirTag to her, so now she has an AirTag on her collar and I can locate her on my phone at all times. Highly recommend, to anyone with anything they can’t afford to lose.

Anyway, back to my birthday, I’ve already made a pretty good haul! My brother bought me new AirPod headphones, as I had chucked my shitty old airport headphones into a trash can with extreme prejudice, a few months ago. I’d recorded a long voice memo for my friend Frank and the headphones mangled all of it, so the new ones are a very nice gift. Frank got me a few new Tanith Lee books I’ve never read (how is that possible??) and a gift cert to a fave restaurant, and Trisha sent me a gold anklet, which is the only kind of jewelry I’m into. I love wearing like 10 anklets at the same time lol. I see as I’m writing this that I have lots of birthday wishes to respond to, and it’s so wonderful to be loved and thought of. Or liked and thought of! Whatever, I’ll take it.

I really neglected my YouTube rambles, in these last months of frenzied otherwise-creating, and that’s a shame as I was getting some decent traction. I’ll need to create exclusive commentary for everything I launch as an NFT, which will be fun, and get back on the horse generally. I look forward to art paying for itself one way or the other, so I can stop having this enormous interruption in my life called fire season. It’s a fun job but no job is that fun.

A lot of people asked how I’m finding Florida, after moving from Hawaii, and I couldn’t be happier! Then they ask how I like the beach, the downtown, the live music, the restaurants, and I’m like — no fucking idea! I never go anywhere or do anything, nor do I want to. I wake up and work on art all day long, take a walk at the park, hit a lift at the gym, see dad once a week, and that’s all I do or want to do. So it’s basically just getting to hang out with my brother all the time and enjoy great weather and a great house/neighborhood, and boom: happy. I’m probably a beach snob now anyway — I used to drive 4 minutes to a pristine black sand beach, clothing optional, whales literally smashing up out of the water like reverse Building 7’s every other day, literal paradise, and so if anyone has hit their beach quota it’s me. I’m sure I’ll go sometime, but it hasn’t been the priority. It’s funny how, when you take strength training pretty seriously, you’re either timing meals for your lift, doing your lift, recovery-eating from your lift, or recovery-sleeping from your lift, over and over again, so all the things you’d imagine doing with a really nice body never get done because you’re too busy making the fuckn doughnuts. I don’t mind, but I’m just saying.

Um, what else? I cut a bunch of my hair off a month or two ago, and it’s already grown out enough that it’s annoying and I think I’ll get it trimmed when I’m back in Florida. I’m trying out the bob lifestyle, or perhaps a “robert” as they say about long bobs, and I love it! It’s like having the longest short hair, or the shortest long hair. So I think I’ll stay with this for a while, and dial it in.

Okay, that’s all the time I have — need to deadlift 240 for the first time!?, and get the rigs pulled out of the immersion fluid to drain. Love to y’all and have a wonderful day, sorry for the dearth of blogs lately but better regularity soon I hope! Xoxo

Hard bodies and hard money are made the same way, by the same process. It took a long time for this to dawn on me.

Information itself is surprisingly inert. For instance, it shouldn’t have been necessary for me to follow Ox around the gym like a baby duckling for three years. I’m reasonably intelligent, and barbells aren’t new. Related theory has been available for a century at least. And first principles don’t change.

But I would have quit a hundred times if not for him. I had to have a personal experience of the information. It was slow going — immediate adversity, chronic soreness, and a mostly hypothetical reward. Beating myself with a stick until it slowly turned into a carrot.

But as Ox pummeled me with theory and the barbell pummeled me with gravity, I learned the difference between self-confidence and self-trust. The first happens in advance of a challenge — “I believe I can do this” — but the second only happens after. “I have the receipts.” Initially, I didn’t trust myself to move big weights, or even small weights. How could I? I’d never done it.

What I’ve learned from both Bitcoin and barbell is that offering data to the human nervous system is like throwing a snow cone into a volcano. We act on information far less than we believe. Whether it’s a whitepaper or a program card, the map isn’t the territory. Only the reps make it real. But we avoid what our nervous systems don’t trust, and we can’t learn to trust what we haven’t navigated.

So, when people say “I don’t understand Bitcoin,” I think what they mean is: this feels foreign, uncomfortable, possibly dangerous, and I don’t trust myself to navigate it, because how could I? And that’s reasonable.

Eustress is a magical hack, moving ourselves volitionally from self-confidence to self-trust, one micro-adversity at a time. It’s a shame the term never really caught on. We linguistically interpret all stress as distress, and most volatility as bad.

Or conversely, we become self-flagellators. Addicted to stress, too anxious and distrustful to “set it and forget it.” This is toxic hustle culture — a collision between the human central nervous system and the collapsing planetary financial system. We believe nothing can improve unless we’re actively fussing over it. Fiat makes cardio fags of us all.

In Bitcoin and barbell both, a major part of the long term strategy is to do the thing and then relax. All the way relax, which really is the hard part.

And then do the thing again.

Um, current sit-rep: Buffy is on the bed eating her dinner, after being neglected outside for a long time while I was on hold with Geico canceling my auto insurance. (I sold the truck last Friday.) Or rather, I canceled online in a twinkling but then had no option / assurance as to where they’d be sending the refund check, so was on hold for not-a-twinkling. It’s crazy how convenient it is for them to take your money but less so, to get some of it back. Anyway, $58.36 is en route here, now — Florida — and Buffy’s solitary confinement, as a minor casualty of the process, is now repealed.

Today is my off-day for lifting, but my brother and Buffy and I did our daily 2.5 mile walk at the park. No matter what time we go, everyday — and it’s highly variable — we always pass, going the opposite direction around the loop, an elderly couple that adores Buffy. Sometimes they’re both walking, sometimes both walking but pushing a wheelchair, and sometimes the man walks and pushes his wife in the wheelchair. I wish they were my grandparents — they RADIATE loving, good-natured energy, and they watch Buffy bustle past in her ineffectual, rocking horse style (more up and down than forward) with shining eyes.

She’s all business — squirrel business — and can’t be bothered to acknowledge anyone. She stays off leash 75% of the time. On-leash 15%, and carried an intermittent 10%, for reasons of three inch legs and no sense of pacing herself.

Then, back at home, she gets locked outside for two hours while momma wrestles with Geico lol. J/K, not usually.

I sold the truck for cash 30 minutes before leaving for the airport, for my flight outta ‘Nam. Lol. I love Hawaii but the abrupt move felt like Vietnam. It was so much, and so tiring. I just didn’t have the bandwidth or time or logistics to sell all the perfectly good things I couldn’t fit in the U-Box (this is a U-Haul thing that’s good for all kinds of moves, not just intercontinental ones, FYI), and that’s always a bit sad, but cleansing too. Luckily, the area where I lived is rife with hippies. So when Trish and I pulled up the “the free shack” to drop off all my perfectly good stuff, it was like a bohemian piranha feeding frenzy. We didn’t even get the boxes to the shack before they were claimed. So, that was easy.

The U-Haul equipment was due back on the whole OTHER side of the island, and so I did retain my wonderful Guild guitar, a bass guitar, and two amps, to sell as I could. The Gibson made it into the box but not the Guild. See what I mean? It’s crazy what you have to leave behind. And each U-Box plus shipping is cost-prohibitive so one does not simply schedule two. As it stands, I can’t afford to ship the one U-Box out, yet, so I’ll just pay to have U-Haul Kona store it until cash flow improves. It’ll be along the lines of $5500. And yes, my shit that did make it into the box is worth it.

Fortunately, an absolutely wonderful singer-songwriter bought my Guild for cheap — it needed a neck re-set and he’d been wanting to learn how to do those anyway. I never would have left it, otherwise. He took the bass and bass amp too, and ultimately came back for the guitar amp, and gave me some coffee he’d grown on his land. In the meantime, though, a very nasty man came to look at the remaining guitar amp (which I had listed on FB marketplace) and he gave me all sorts of problems. It seems like God gives me enough swine to practice not casting my pearls, early recognition, and yet I’m so generally accustomed to normal nice people that I catch myself mid-cast. That guy was a fucking pain in the ass right from the get-go. He asked what kind of flowers grew on the tree, as I let him inside. I said “I don’t know”. He said “You don’t know what flowers grow at your own house?” I said, “This isn’t my house” (although, yes, it’s likely I would also not know the names of flowers at my own house). He said, “Oh, moving huh,” with this energy like it’s a tap out to leave Hawaii. He was a haole by the way. I said “yeah”. He said “where to?” I said “Florida”. He said “You know how that’s spelled, right? I sighed, pointing at the amp to no avail, and said “How”. He said “F L O R I D U H”. I said, “So there’s the amp”.

It didn’t have a power cord, and he quibbled about this. I said it’s just a normal cord, like all amps have. He called it a “wire” and said it was special, special order, he wasn’t sure if he could get one, he’d have to call his buddy. I said it’s not special, it’s literally every single amp cord, they’re all the same. He said “no that’s a special wire.” It just went on like that. He didn’t buy it, but then he messaged me later and said he’d take it off my hands in exchange for giving me a ride to the airport. I said, I have a ride to the airport, thank you.

Anyway, fucking jackass. This is why I gave away so many things. Multiply that experience by 500 and put it on a strict deadline and that’s what it would have been.

The lady who bought my truck was super great, and she lived walking distance from my friend / landlord’s house in Kona, so logistics were so easy. I didn’t get what I wanted for the truck, but I kept having to drop the price $1000 / day to get any traction. A bunch of people said they might buy it but no one did until her, so thank god. It’s a great truck. Her vehicle got side-swiped in the middle of the night by an allegedly sober driver, so much so that the offending girl’s own vehicle was immobilized, and she walked home and was sober by the time police were involved. Anyway, the lady in question had her car totaled out by insurance for $2400, not even close to what she’d need to buy a new one of course, because that’s how they do. So it goes. She loves the truck, and was smiling when she drove it away. Which was 1/2 before I left for the airport.

God, it was hectic!

My gf Trisha came to Hawaii to help me move, which extra sucked for her because she just got done moving herself and hasn’t even properly gotten her new place set up, but her help was invaluable and her company was a silver lining (the dark cloud being moving, period, which I’ve done too much of and don’t enjoy). Realistically it was four solid days of labor, and then a nice last day together where we enjoyed the island a bit. Then she was off, back to the mainland, and I stayed another three days to have various experiences with FB marketplace people and kind of rest up a bit. Trisha and I slept on camping pads at the bungalow because the mattress was the first thing to go in the box (and yes, it’s worth it), and it was a hot, buggy, also very rainy experience, with very few of even the normal amenities. One bit of good news for me but bad news for Trish is that apparently she has the sweeter blood, so the mosquitoes had a heyday with her but largely left me alone, which is generally not the case. I bet she’s still scratching, poor thing. It is quite rustic and jungly out there, and we were both exhausted and relieved to arrive back at Paul’s (the house where I don’t know the names of the flowers), via Saddle Road over the volcano, through a massive rainstorm at night, with trailer lights mostly not working. Thanks, U-Haul!

After I took Trish to the airport, I anticipated a day of total leisure and recuperation, punctuated only by a lashes appointment, which is also a very relaxing affair. When you get your lashes done, you literally have to just lay there with your eyes closed, obviously. Anyway, my friend / landlord was out of town just then, but his friend was covering the Air BnB’s for that week, and she was trying to get her ex-boyfriend over, and asked if I could just not come home after my lashes appointment. Or, not for a long time anyway. I was like “um, but where would I go” and she was like “oh, the beach! have a cocktail! karaoke! go to the gym!” Funnily enough, as nice as all those things might be on any other occasion, I was freaking bone tired and not interested in just wandering around Kona or doing anything at all. I just wanted to be resting.

Ironically enough, my lashes lady was a bit late for our appointment because she’d been next door, talking to the business just behind hers, with whom she shares a wall. Apparently the owner there had started carrying on some kind of sexual affair, and she and her lashes customers had been subjected to very loud fucking noises on the other side of the thin wall for several weeks, now, and she was giving him a talking to. So I complained about my situation — being asked to just wander the town — and there was a perfectly good bedroom? Just go to the bedroom? Anyway, it all fell through because the guy didn’t come over so I was relieved to just head back to the house, lashes in full array, and take an early bedtime at like 7pm.

So the rest of my stay was selling stuff on FB marketplace and resting and doing some laundry, repacking, trying to sell that damn truck. Fielding offers, stuff kept falling through.

Oh, I got my hair done! That’s one thing. Got like 8 inches chopped off, looks great. It’s now a long bob, and I actually think it needs another inch or two off, but I’ll wait until the layers need trimming and the experiment further. I’ve had long hair forever, with a brief short stint in like 2014, so this is nice change. I had to see my beloved Francesco one last time. He’s been my hairdresser and photographer on the island, and I’ll miss him so much. A true artist, complete handle on aesthetics and skill.

Gawd, what else. There was so much; it was so much. Anyway — it’s over. Thank god.

I only decided to move to Florida late last fire season, and then just came to visit towards the end of the year, after I got laid off. The visit turned into a few months, and I realized I had already moved, mentally. My dad and brother are here, my work travel logistics are easier with and without Buffy, the flow of life just bringing me this way. So it was with real regret I informed my friend/landlord Paul, because he’s become a very important person in my life and a friend forever, imo. I loved our collaboration with the work trade, resulting in the bungalow, the life I was able to erect on the Big Island, with his help and cooperation, and I think it was mutually beneficial. A part of me would love to live there forever, but another part of me would like to have A/C and be able to receive Amazon packages and do laundry at home. So, the bungalow was a wild experience — not wild like party, but wild like rustic, jungle, beauty, black sand beach, bohemian utopia for reals. That’s a rare experience, and I’m lucky to have had it.

Most of what I want and need has to do with a contentious dialectic of evolving tensions and resolutions on my deepest level that is difficult if not impossible to convey. Living in one place versus another is truly the least of it, for the surface reasons in any case. I want to lift weights, write books, and play music/shows every day, or most days. And that’s easier here, for reasons.

Also, a really great thing here lately: I’m sober 21 days now, and launched into tracking and optimizing my macros the very next day after I got back to Florida. And by the way, I’m comfortably set up living with my brother, so the logistics on this end were easy and smooth — it’s just the Hawaii side that was tough. So, as far as macros, I know this type of thing can be hard to understand or frame correctly, and that’s mostly because everyone’s obsessed with losing weight, period.

What I want is to learn to eat like a strength athlete, so that I can better train like a strength athlete, since I’m one foot in, one foot out of that space anyway. I could carry on forever with my 3x5’s and fairly haphazard but vegan diet (I do eggs, conditionally), and it would be fine. Drinking and smoking too, it would be fine. In fact the alcohol dialogue has been so obfuscated by inference of vice and addiction and disaster and mayhem, in general, that I’ve had to turn it over in my mind a variety of ways.

Ultimately the easiest thing to say is, yeah — I want to learn to eat like a pro. That might mean cutting weight sometimes, or bulking at other times — it just means eating to support performance and aesthetic intentionally, and knowing how. I’ve never before advanced to that level, despite all my interest in barbell. So alcohol simply isn’t a part of that interface. That’s the long and short of it.

ChatGPT is enormously helpful — there’s never been a better time to learn to track macros, from a technological standpoint. I helped Nick (dead bf) dial in his diet leading up to his bodybuilding show in 2019, so I had some familiarity, but never truly on my own behalf. And at that time — even as recent as it seems — there was no ChatGPT, and we had to put everything into a tracker. We used MyFitnessPal. GPT is wayyyyyyy easier. Way better. Awesome.

So, I’m starting off with a goal of getting 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight, roughly, and the challenge of it is the proof that I absolutely have been under eating and under proteining. I’m just going moderate carbs and fats for now, and after 3 or 4 weeks as I get accustomed to my new lifestyle, I’ll see what else I want to tweak. So like here’s what my tracking looks like every day — this one is for yesterday:

2/17

Sober day 20

Weight: 148

Squat: 3x3@155

Plate loaded hip thrust: 3x12@90

Plate loaded calf raise: 3x12@45

Abs

Movement: 4.1 miles brisk walk

P 158 / C 105 / F 33 — ~1,700 kcal [ « that means protein, carbs, fat]

Cigarettes: 2

(Don’t judge my poor showing at the gym, I’m still wrecked from the jet lag and time zone and the move generally, on the struggle bus.) Normally I just keep a lifting log, and obviously this log is quite expanded. I’ll expand it even more on Wednesdays, as I’ll be adding in weekly measurements of certain bodily dimensions, and taking progress photos too. With strength recomp — that’s my continuing goal, of course — scale weight itself can be a poor indicator, so the measurements will be helpful over time. Eventually it’s likely I’ll stop tracking so much, and maybe just go all the way back to my simple lifting log. But not until I feel truly fluent in the language of macros. It’s only been four days and I’m already thinking much more easily in those terms, so it’s happening fast. This aspect of my lifestyle is very overdue, but we’re not ready til we’re ready, are we?

Also, I learned last year that GPT can tell me SO MUCH about what’s happening, just by looking at my lifting log. So it’s fun knowing that the more I record, the more GPT will be able to analyze and help me professionalize. Amazing times we live in.

Oh, if you’re curious what this is looking like IRL, it’s basically two protein smoothies a day, two reasonable meals, and a cup of soy yogurt before bed. It’s not crazy. And I’m getting my supplements locked in too.

I turn 50 on May 8 so I’m really excited to see where my strength + macro journey will have taken me by then! I’m very grateful to my body for bearing with me through all the bullshit, especially these last few years since Nick died and I started really abusing myself (but still lifting!), and I’m just all done with the cope. Ready to be pro. Pro what, you may ask? Pro Hannah. That’s it, that’s all I care about. Wouldn’t mind modeling fitness clothing or something though, lol.

Music-wise, major stall because I was writing this book, so I’ll talk about that first —

Book-wise, it’s pretty much done! And it’s a totally different book than last I talked about. I rewrote this bitch four times, and it changed, massively, version to version. Not even recognizable. The final version is just a really conversational series of essays, which is honestly my stamping grounds and I should just stay there, even for long form. It’s def a Bitcoin book (everyone groaning to hear this). No truly, everyone hates Bitcoin so much, it’s fucking crazy. They either hate it or they own it and want more, that’s it. That’s the two kinds of people. So a Bitcoin book of essays sounds probably really boring, but I’m not into boring shit and I don’t make boring shit so therein lies the paradox. Let’s see, maybe just a quick excerpt? Here we go:

You can’t actually unback anything in a closed system. The backing doesn’t disappear — it slips. It goes somewhere else.

Humans make tools to save time; that’s our signature move. So when we build an apex tool like fiat money and then unback it, the backing doesn’t vanish. It slides all the way back down the stack — to time itself.

Basically I had to get all my ish worked out of my system — all those previous ideas and drafts are very strong, and can be re-purposed later; but this collection of essays is exactly right, exactly me, and exactly wonderful. I love it, and I’ll seek Bitcoin Mag publication first and then self publish if that fails. Either way, I’m thrilled.

Okay so that’s in its final freshening, and then music-wise, I only have a beater guitar with a long story right now. The Gibson is still in the U-Box in Kona, not even headed this way yet, and the Guild had to go to that nice guy. This De Rosa guitar was one I picked up on Craigslist in Calexico when I was expecting to be on a heli-fueling job for a long time, living out of a hotel in El Centro. I’d already been there like 3 months, and the job was nowhere near done, due to high winds. Well, no sooner did I buy the guitar then I got pulled of the job, due in roundabout way to a coworker being a jackass, and reassigned all over the place. The guitar lived at the hangar in San Diego for a year, then I grabbed it the next fire season and got it over to my dad’s in Greeley Colorado. Then it was accumulated into his move to Florida, and my brother stored it here, and long story short it plays like shit and sounds like shit and hurts my fingers a lot. But it’s my only thing going. So I dropped it off at a shop today to get improved and I’ll have it back tomorrow. My chops are, once again, garbage due to long disuse, so it’s a journey, but I can’t get anywhere with my fingers bleeding on cheese cutters. I’m really enjoying playing and singing, though, so ideally I’ll get the rust and dust knocked off, form a band, maybe get talent show hosting going at old folks homes, or hosting karaoke, just whatever I need to do. It’ll be fine. No shortage of venues here.

As the book writing cools down, there’s a ton of Suno production stuff I want to play with. Basically I have a backlog of 30+ songs all written, and a bottleneck on production (ugh don’t get me started) has driven me to learn how to source AI intelligently on production. Lots of pushback on this from people who consider any involvement of AI to be a total invalidation of artistry upfront, but whatever. Feel free to pay for my studio time, or STFU. I just want to make stuff, that’s it. My songs are great. I have no ego or embarrassment about my songs.

Oh! Two made it onto a compilation CD here in the last few days, and that CD is available here. How to play a CD these days? I have no idea. I ordered one, and I don’t have a CD player. Felt important to support myself lol. The two songs that made it on were Rollercoaster and Kiss Kiss Bang, by the way:

So that’s a glimmer of hope in an otherwise dark world (for indie singer songwriters, I mean). Zero AI involvement in these tracks, that was a stipulation, but until budgetary conditions improve I’ll be producing more music as best I can, whatever way I can. I have a bunch out already though, you can check out on the channel IYI.

Bitcoin mining update: Abe and I will be moving our rigs ONCE AGAIN to a new host in Texas, this spring. The previous host was good not great, and the new guy is someone I’ve become legitimately close with. He’s not a host per se, but he’s setting up a MASSIVE mining facility on behalf of himself and his partner, and so it’s less of a formal arrangement and more of a bro hookup, which is exactly what we need. I’ll have to go physically move the rigs, in a few months, and that will be nice because I’ve actually never seen them. They went straight from the distributor to the host, when we bought them (in several waves). Bitcoin price action is garbage right now but as I say in my book — price action is the cope of speculative tourism. Even the world’s best store of value can look like a shitcoin on a short enough time horizon, so zoom tf out. Bitcoin is an infrastructure in cyberspace that will continue to become increasingly important — not only as a store of value, but as a leash on AI and a means of cyber force projection. So yes, I’m still all about the mining, but the question of power cost has never been more pertinent. And this move should improve things.

SO: new home address. New hairstyle. New book coming out. New macro / dietary focus. New sober focus. Same old lifting focus. New music opportunities. New hosting location. That’s about the sum of it.

My first day back, I slept til 11 and woke up groggy, because that’s 6am Hawaii time. Fielded the livestream release party for this CD compilation (my songs are at 35m and 3 hrs but I was only available for the 35m timeframe) while meeting my dad and brother for dinner at the same time, so that was a little hectic. Couldn’t sleep til 3am, late morning again, slowly walking it back into this time zone and feeling normal.

Now it’s time for a big meal of fava tofu lettuce wraps and an episode of Better Call Saul, but I’ll share some of my fave photos from here lately. Should be back on a more regular blogging schedule here on out, I would think. Much love to you all, wherever you may be and whatever you’re doing. Thanks for being along on this ride! More soon xoxoxoxoxo

As we all know, perfect is the enemy of done. So this is done, not perfect. I’m extra happy about this one for two reasons, though: one is the indisputable value of the content, and the other is that my brother helped me insert movie clips in a few places, so it’s a bit of a step up from my other videos!

So let me explain what it’s about and why I wanted to make it. Like most things with me, something about the “alpha male” dialogue has felt off, and for a long time. I’ve been trying to put my finger on it. And usually the only way I can do that is back off and back out enough to fully reframe, and then spend some time grokking that until a clear analogy or metaphor comes to mind, which I can offer. So that’s some of what I did here.

What I eventually realized is that there’s a basic error in the manosphere: correlation ≠ causation. Alpha masculinity has been measured against women’s response, which mistakes correlation for cause. Alpha masculinity is not produced by women’s approval; it is better understood as a man’s accurate engagement with reality. Women tend to trust men who deal accurately with reality, and they respond more warmly — but that response is correlative, not causal.

Once we separate cause from correlation, it’s obvious.

This is what’s been feeling off to me about the entire question. It’s framing women as a reward distribution system, when we are in fact a threat avoidance system. Partnering with men is how we avoid threats, and accurately engaging reality is how men mitigate threats. A man shouldn’t have to be “rewarded” into accurately engaging reality. That’s just what he should be doing.

But lots of men aren’t, and what are they doing instead? They’re engaging with their own egos, or with their own trauma, or with women as a perceived reward distribution system. This is the ‘weak men make hard times part’, okay. “How should I act to get women to reward me for thinking I’m doing something, as a man, that I should be doing anyway, but I’m not doing it because I’m too busy trying to game the female reward distribution system.”

So I’m cautiously optimistic that I unfucked this whole logical fallacy in my video. What I did was, I got a really clear analogy going, and then I referred back to it repeatedly, as the discussion proceeded. Here’s the meta-analogy that I thought worked best: women as the humans at the campfire making food, and men as the watchful dogs, with whom we co-evolved as humans!, minding the perimeter. I made clear that the analogy served to illustrate mutually beneficial cooperation, not “men are dogs” or anything like that. So the dogs are valuable because they have senses the humans don’t, and can therefore mind perimeter in ways humans can’t. They’re rewarded with food in order to keep them around, NOT in order to inspire them to mind perimeter — that’s what any good dog should be doing in the first place, humans or not.

So what modern males are doing, trying to game women, is essentially like if the dogs asked the humans, “How can I get more treats? Should I bark more, bark less, roam further, stay closer?” In which case the humans would be like — look man, I don’t know. You’re the fuckin dog, you tell me. The whole point is that you’re good at this.

So then I go into three alpha archetypes, where only one of them is sovereign — aka a truly perceptive dog, doing what he’d be doing anyway, and accordingly valued and rewarded. For this archetype, I use Corporal Hicks from the movie Aliens, one of my favorite movies! He’s the perfect example of a high force projector male who can down-regulate and up-regulate accurately, in accordance with reality as things change. This makes him incredibly valuable.

When there’s nothing to do, Hicks does nothing, but remains watchful. When there’s something to do, he ramps up as fast/high as he needs to. He’s not performative, his presence stabilizes everyone around him, and he metabolizes chaos instead of manufacturing it. This is the epitome of a high caliber male. He’s not “built for emergency”; he’s built for life, including life’s emergencies. This is the kind of guy a woman would want at her side on the best day or the worst day, on any day.

If we go back to our campfire analogy and plug in Hicks, he’d function perfectly in that cooperation and be highly valued.

I use Private Hudson as our false alpha archetype:

One of the best parts of Aliens is watching Hudson melt down, over the course of the movie, but his early bravado is a very good capture of what misunderstanding alpha energy looks like. I make the point that, if everything had gone fine, it would be easy to come away with the impression that Hudson was the alpha male. Ripley was fatigued by his swagger, earlier, and his catastrophizing, later, but she was a very stable and high caliber woman. If she had been more typically anxious and disregulated, it’s likely she would have cued to him.

Which again brings up my point: we have to measure a man’s relationship to reality as his alpha index, NOT measure women’s response to a man as his alpha index.

If we go back to our campfire analogy and plug in Hudson, that looks like a dog that barks all the time when nothing’s happening, and then whimpers and whines if something is happening. Not alpha, not valuable.

Then I go into our wounded alpha archetype: Wolverine.

I indulged myself briefly, here, in the video, for a few reasons: one is that I was irritated with the casting of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine in the X-Men movies because one of Wolverine’s most distinguishing traits was his very short, very broad stature. I am personally WILD about this type of male physique, probably due to Wolverine being my first crush, and I remain pretty amazed tbh about how much the world shits on short men. Anyway, Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine was fine but they cast a tall actor, and this just pissed me right off.

Anyway, per my discussion, Wolverine is very traumatized, both from his youth and being medically experimented on…ah, we can just say his whole life. Lots of trauma. He’s a brooder, always brooding, but fantastic in an emergency. Very VERY high force projection male. I unpacked the love triangle with Phoenix and Cyclops, of course, how dumb and gay I thought Cyclops was (my 8 year old self was not impressed), and how starry eyed I was over Wolverine. This translated directly into how I approached dating all my life, with mixed results.

The point being, if we as women value men’s force projection (and we do), it’s easy to see that Wolverine is better to have around than Hudson, but arguably much worse to have around than Hicks. Hicks stays in reality, no matter how good or bad reality gets. Hudson stays in his ego, making him a poor judge of reality. Wolverine stays in his trauma, making him a poor judge of reality. Wolverine might be the best guy on the worst day, but the worst guy on the best day. He can definitely up-regulate but he can’t down-regulate. So if we plug him into our campfire scenario, he’d do a phenomenal job of minding the perimeter. But he might also kill a few of the other dogs here and there lol. Loose cannon energy, as a result of being unhealed (ironic, I know, given his mutant ability to physically heal).

What always appealed to me about the Wolverine archetype, beyond just the physical, was his courage, his ferocity, and his deep loyalty combined with giving basically zero fucks about the social niceties. The only reason I’m not still trying to date a Wolverine type myself is because I’ve already found out the hard way that you can’t really have a good day with a guy like that. So the Wolverines of the world will always have my heart, in a sense, but they aren’t good partners.

That’s why I think it’s really important to compare a Wolverine alpha to a Hicks alpha — force projection alone doesn’t a sovereign make. Wolverine is like a wound that learned to fight. Hicks is like a warrior priest — internally calm, cohesive, even peaceful. Available to escalate, available to chill and Netflix. That’s a priceless alpha right there. And of course the Hudsons of the world; pretty much getting the whole thing backwards.

I also did a little conjecture about alpha versus beta versus omega, all that. My thinking here could dial in imo, but really what I’m proposing is that force projection + in reality aren’t so much “alpha” traits as they are masculinity traits. Functioning masculinity, I mean. To me, “alpha” versus “beta” and so forth is more about men’s hierarchical arrangements with one another, and not so much about our perceptions as women. It’s possible that masculinity itself is degraded now to the point that we’re quick to assign “alpha” energy to what should be recognized as baseline masculine energy. In which case, videos like mine are further contaminating the lexicon but oh well, the algorithm is what it is right now.

Again, I’m quite optimistic about this framing being helpful! Something I do mention once or twice is that it’s certainly possible to game women, by seeing us as a reward distribution system and acting accordingly. This is Golden Retriever energy, right? LARPing as a perimeter defense. Gaming us can include being mean to us on purpose, all kinds of things, and I can’t claim it doesn’t work — but what I do say is that it’s always possible to win stupid prizes by playing stupid games, and I don’t really consider that line of inquiry worth pursuing.

So that’s the video! Including a few movie clips thanks to Abe’s help. I’m hoping this will be of service to the meta-dialogue, and of course I’d love to hear any feedback that can help further my thinking.

Love y’all and Merry Xmas Eve! xoxoxo

I want to apologize for the dearth of posts and otherwise normal levels of interaction in the last weeks. I’ve been writing a book called Aesthenticity, and this is a word I made up combining aesthetics and authenticity. It’s directed at women but will be a good read for anyone imo. It’s quite short, about 20k words, and my plan A for publishing is through Bitcoin Magazine’s book imprint. If I did my job well enough, then I don’t need a plan B haha, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. Right now the whole thing is written but un-edited, and I’m taking a week or so to get my head right before I dive back in for a few deep editorial passes, and then I’ll pitch it in the first week or two of 2026.

Let me just share with you guys what it’s looking like so far:

Aesthenticity: Femininity as Technology

Working Outline (Preview)

PART I — THE GLITCH

Why Everything Feels Wrong

1. The Incentive Glitch
Fiat money severed reward from value, corrupting the incentive architecture that previously kept human behavior coherent.

2. Shitcoins & Maladaptations
When incentives break, people adopt coping strategies that feel empowering but actually degrade signal, trust, and long-term stability.

3. Feminism, the Manosphere, and Other Hallucinations
Modern gender ideologies are opposing adaptations to the same broken map, each diagnosing symptoms while missing the underlying incentive failure.

PART II — THE FEMININE OS

Femininity as a Technology

4. Femininity as Technology
Femininity is a high-bandwidth generative system optimized for pattern recognition, meaning-detection, and safety calibration—not a personality trait or political identity.

5. The Resonance Engine
Women navigate reality through discernment and resonance rather than linear rationality, which works precisely until the data field becomes chaotic.

6. Boromiring
Male rationality predictably distorts in the presence of female sexual and symbolic power, creating a temporary glitch state that women routinely misinterpret.

INTERLUDE — AFTER POST-NUT CLARITY

Marriage as Incentive Technology

7. Post-Nut Clarity as OS Reboot
Post-nut clarity reveals that male rationality is context-dependent and requires containment to remain aligned over time.

8. Marriage as Asymmetric Incentive-Reconciliation
Historically, marriage functioned as a civilizational technology that aligned male volatility with female long-term orientation through structured commitment.

PART III — ADVERSARIAL INPUTS

How Systems Get Hacked

9. Enchantment, Glamouring, and Male Hacking
Men—often unconsciously—exploit vulnerabilities in the feminine OS through charm, attention, and narrative control.

10. Ideology as Decoder Hijack
Ideologies distort feminine perception by pre-interpreting experience, replacing discernment with script.

PART IV — HARDWARE & SOFTWARE

How Women Exit Fiat Reality

11. The Body as Hardware
Physical weakness amplifies perceptual chaos, while strength restores nervous-system coherence and signal fidelity.

12. Barbell Training as OS Reformat
Progressive overload provides predictable stress that rebuilds bodily trust, emotional calm, and intuitive accuracy.

13. Discernment as Software
Sound judgment emerges when a coherent body meets an undistorted signal environment.

PART V — THE PROTOCOL

What Comes After Collapse

14. Why Marriage Must Be Re-Protocolized
In a world of broken incentives, marriage must be understood and practiced as a formal protocol rather than a romantic abstraction.

15. Sound Women, Sound Men, Sound Money
Civilizational repair proceeds in order: clean incentives, coherent women, aligned men, and functional long-term structures.

****

And there we go. There is a 100% correlation between the nerdy shit I like to think about and the nerdy shit this book is about, so it very nearly wrote itself. There is ALSO a 100% correlation between the nerdy shit this book is about and the degree to which adjacent dialogue, “out there” in the world so to speak, feels broken, to me.

So what I’ve done is created a model for thinking about femininity specifically, and gender directly, and human civilization forwards and backwards as a result. And it’s the first model I’ve ever encountered that doesn’t feel all fucked up. It doesn’t demonize anybody, it accounts for how stupid and toxic everything has gotten, it accounts for weaponized ideology while entirely sidestepping those tired lenses and all that baggage. And a MAJOR reason as to why it can do all this (and more!) is that I place broken money front and center. We’re all fish, and the broken money is the water in our aquarium. We have to account for it if we’re going to talk about the health of the fish. Dammit.

Also it draws heavily on evolutionary psychology, macro economics, and critiques of centralized power structures coming from, obviously, the other folks like myself on the decentralization train. I have no education or credentials in any of these areas. But it turns out that, if you really like women, and you really like men — and I do! — and you want to make account for how both sexes seem to feel and function and behave, then you have to pull in a lot of context, so I did.

The result is a book (draft) that I LOVE. I mean I love it. I’m passionately in love with it. Also, I’ve been sort of “field testing” my model real hard — just applying aspects of it to situations in my own life, or in others’ lives, past present future, conversations and “takes” I see on the internet, everywhere I can. And you know what? My model fucking works.

My wildest dream outcome would be that others find this model valuable as well, and apply it to their lives, their relationships, their books or podcasts or comments, and as a result we all exit grievance culture that much faster. I would love to watch men and women cooperate more fully, and have a better vocabulary with which to do so.

Now, in case you know me in person and are wondering why I’ve arguably fucked up so much of my own life if I’m this smart, that’s actually a feature not a bug! I’ve deeply misunderstood lots of things, while deeply understanding others, and in ways that felt hard to articulate. And for such a chattering, monkey-minded species that we are, you really have to wonder what’s going on when some entire category of thing that keeps happening feels difficult if not impossible to articulate, right?

So you can kind of understand this book as a model that I’m offering, but you wouldn’t be wrong to understand it as me being like “goddammit I guess I have to make up my own whole ass vocabulary to say what I want to say”. Both are true.

But to get even more granular, what actually (had) happened was this, and I’ll just run it down chronologically, and this was all over the course of this last year, I’d say:

I seem to be aging well, as a woman, and women are always like “why do you keep getting younger” and I wanted to collect my thoughts about that, and offer the most helpful ones.

I collected my thoughts and realized that all my “vanity” stuff is really the tip of the iceberg of me getting all the way down to bedrock first principles in some other way, and that’s why the vanity part works so well.

I coined the term “Aesthenticity” with the intention to sort it all into a book this year.

My whole 2025 was really fucked up and stupid — not worth going into.

Here in the last 2 months of the year, the stars finally aligned for me to do some real writing, dang it. So I started Aesthenticity.

I quickly figured out that the concept had already grown wildly out of its original proportions — like I planted a seedling and it had already become kudzu covering the house, the barn, the windmill — monster space kudzu that breached every containment I erected.

I made an even bigger containment, and brought in cultural feminism plus fiat, and they way we can’t do anything remotely sensible for ourselves, as women, until we actually look — with our actual eyeballs — at how fake and gay and retarded our “narratives” have gotten about being female, and what that means.

I basically rage-wrote a 75k word manuscript that felt really good, I’m not gonna lie, but only after that did I realize: that’s not the book. That’s me going nuclear on my grievances with feminist grievance culture. So I might reformat that into some sort of future book, and this blog post yesterday is an excerpt from that first pass, there’s some strong stuff.

But no, I realized a deeper model was emerging, and also that I have to be the thing I’m recommending, as I recommend it. It’s not enough to talk about it, I have to be about it, in my authorial role. And so the current draft is proof of that work. Again, it’s only ~20k words, versus the former 75k, which proves that once you really figure out what you’re saying, it’s not that hard to say. Getting there is the wordy part.

Now, the reason I know it’s “done” — as a draft, not final yet — is because yes I’m still having thoughts and connections and epiphanies all the time, but they’re serving to fill in the gaps, not materially grow the footprint of the model. So it’s got enough structural integrity to become load bearing in its own right now, I’d say.

Truly, this has felt as much like an engineering project as a creative writing project, and the “creativity” of it is more in the original thought than in the prose per se. This has been interesting for me because I care about prose aesthetics a lot. But my editorial passes will be structural, they will be load-testing and leak-testing and pressure-testing in purpose, and if the language can be appealing then that’s fine too but it’s not the most important thing at all. Clarity and inevitability matter more.

So, does the book still talk about aesthetics and authenticity? Yes, but in a deep way that matters more than my original thinking could have done.

The book outgrew my original thinking by leaps and bounds, and it became typical in the last few weeks especially for me to receive the next connector or hinge in my sleep, almost. Or half waking states, early in the morning, such that I would have to jump up and start writing, not to lose it. Other than a daily barbell workout and a walk at the park, plus an episode of a show in the evening with dinner, it’s been truly an all day thing for more than a month, and the most wonderful time of my life, ever. This is how I’m happiest, hands down no contest.

I thought I’d be grieving my writing time, in this week of self-forced disengagement — possibly even as hard as Erika Kirk is grieving Charlie! — but it’s actually been nice so far. I’ve continued to wake up with epiphanies, but again they’re trending as connectors not expanders, now. That’s good.

Also I’ve been working as much as possible on my little YouTube channel, trying to post something every few days, and I’m up to 250 subs now. I can monetize at 1000 subs, so please do sub even if you don’t care to watch — it will help me get that paying for itself that much sooner. AND, obviously I try to put out good content but it takes practice. Here lately I’ve been either reading excerpts or discussing related ideas. I don’t do any flashy editing — it’s literally just me sharing my thoughts as best I know how. The comments have been wonderful for the most part, really high quality engagement, and I was thrilled to get this one the other day:

“You are the most intelligent, original female creator I have seen on YouTube. You're like a female Dr. Orion taraban "psychacks" you should reach out to another creator for a collab, it is the fastest way to grow your channel. You deserve a million subscribers.”

I receive fair criticism for the wandering, rambling nature of my ad hoc posts, and I’m certainly more succinct reading an excerpt BUT I’m trying to improve my real-time delivery. It takes a lot of cringe to get based, no lie. I’d be very happy if the channel could begin yielding some income, next year, and I’ll certainly hope to foster some interest there for this book and future publications.

Also I'm really excited to start another book ASAP! Hopefully with a publishing relationship set in stone, and a real pipeline from concept to commercialization that’s practiced and proven. I have a million ideas, following on this one, and I already had a short list of book ideas even before.

The more powerfully I can move in this direction, the more sense my life is going to make, to be honest. I ‘trial’ my ideas on coworkers etc, of course, and they’re like “what the fuck are you talking about” so I gotta get myself connected to the medium, the venue, and the audience that’s actually interested in what I have to offer.

One of my biggest goals, modest as it sounds, is to simply have a different experience in casual conversation, as a result of writing this book. For instance, I’m on airplanes a lot, and a person will ask, “What do you do?” And then I’m like: uhhhh, confusing mishmash of things I already know they won’t understand, and their clarifying questions will derail us into territory that will make it even harder for me to be intelligible or talk about my preferred ideas, blah blah. And yeah it’s fine to experiment with answering different ways, but limited success.

Anyway: how amazing would it be — next time a person on the airplane says, “So what do you do?” — I can say, “I’m a writer and I just published a book,” and they’ll say, “Oh, what about?” And I’ll describe it, and they’ll say some version of “what the fuck are you talking about” — BUT! BUT!! — it won’t matter because now they can fuck off, or they can fuck off but buy the book, or they can ask questions and I can answer and they can get it or not? Literally I don’t care, but it is a bit exhausting to be so unintelligible in these bazillions of daily / weekly / monthly type chitchats.

And obviously if the book can sell, turn a profit, influence better dialogue, and open the door for some interviews or podcast appearances or drive more subs to Youtube or Substack, just all of that would be great. Just great.

My brother is a big fan of the manuscript so far, and of course he’s been on the final stretch of publishing his new video game as I’ve been in the trenches with Aesthenticity versions 1.0 and 2.0 (the aesthenticining"). My brother is an indie game dev and I’ve been visiting him here in Florida. Anyway, he asked me the other week if I’d still go and do fire season if I was pulling in enough from writing to choose. I really had to think — because I like my job a lot, most times — and I said I’d love to have the choice, and it’s too hard to say because it feels like a reach that I could actually have the choice? Idk.

But I do feel born to write, and truly nothing makes me happier. I’m also glad I haven’t published anything before this that’s super undercooked because this book can just emerge into the bookosphere on its own terms, not having to deal with any other author associations.

I will say something wild right now, here before I change subject: for reasons having to do with my family, work, background, and I guess psyche, I seem prepared to truly like men and to truly critique woman-stuff. I’m not talking about “taking sides” whatsoever, I mean just that. Liking men in general, critiquing woman stuff constructively.

Taken in combination, these two traits have afforded me some kind of goddamn superpower, apparently. That’s how captured and broken the dialogue is, in a world where men are always wrong and women are Schroedinger’s Special Victims. It’s been nice to fully come out of the closet. I’m out! I’m outtttttt. It’s so liberating. Probably that’s been the actual best part of writing this book.

Anyway. Today I’m getting a mani / pedi, way overdue, and yesterday Abe and I (and Buffy of course) had our weekly dinner with Dad. Here we are at his apartment, Abe taking the photo:

My dad said he’s gonna use his cane to beat the shit out of the next person who plays a Christmas Carol in the dining hall, so that’s how holly jolly he’s feeling. My brother and I reflected that nostalgia harnessed to anything is one hell of a drug — this accounts for Christmas frenzy, Star Wars adults, Disney adults, and the experience of listening to our favorite songs. Lots of other stuff I’m sure.

Anyway, that’s all I have for now. Thanks for reading, and please do sub on the YouTube channel if at all possible, it will help me get to that minimum 1k subs for the pro user stuff. Have a great Sunday! xoxo

Uhhhhhh….PS here’s a photo that I want to use as the social preview, and apparently I can’t do that anymore without also putting it inside the blog? which seems dumb? so okay Substack, whatever:

***

Humor itself is a social technology. It represents a healthy response from the emotional immune system. The war on things being funny waged by cultural feminism has been largely rejected by men, so we mostly see the ravages of humorlessness in the female populace. They’re not interested in “lightening up”, so it all gets heavier and heavier.

Men use humor with each other almost constantly, and it serves an astonishing range of purposes. Not only is it okay for them to do this, it’s of utmost importance. I hope I’ve made the case by now that men regulating other men is how we all win, and humor is a major tool in their arsenal. Humor is the fastest way for men to mutually calibrate, to smooth the rough edges of their hierarchies, and to cement trust. Legitimate hardship is a chronic characteristic of men’s labor, and they use humor to convey stress while encouraging, rather than demoralizing, their peers.

Men’s humor is not just a trait, it’s a skill that they polish, practice, deploy, and respect. Via humor, men gauge, stress test, correct, include, and warn one another. Men make the work day go by, with humor, and if there’s one thing men do a lot of, it’s work.

Women opting out of humor breaks a valuable circuit between men and women.

The Feminist Reframing of Humor as Violence

Cultural feminism frames healthy masculine humor as aggression, misogyny, coercion, or danger. The degree to which we’re encouraged to be offended, as women, is escalating and never-ending. We take a microscope to normal interactions and look for micro-aggressions, like scientists isolating a pathogen before it can spread. We see an inexorable creep in the HR-ification of every job site, every work space, every company culture. Beyond just policing arguably offensive jokes, it’s now a question of surveilling whether anyone, anywhere, might be offended by anything, or if the potential even exists.

The feminizing tyranny of humorlessness is such that even suggesting a woman might, you know, participate in a legitimate social cohesion technology, is met with such ferocity. We’re “setting all women back” if each one of us doesn’t hold the line, everywhere, for the moral policing of men in their own spaces. Our scrutiny of male humor is so heightened that it’s as if every rape that’s ever transpired in the history of the planet is re-occuring, in the event of a bawdy joke. Again, this is self-infantilizing behavior, aided and abetted by the forces of cultural feminism. The underlying premise is that men are bad, and their humor represents an attack on women. The best defense is a good offense, and thanks to infinitely metasticizing HR that’s never more than a phone call away.

The Loss of Female Elasticity

The feminine psyche, exposed to chronically high doses of ideologically mandated humorlessness, loses its elasticity. The irony is that exactly those traits we increasingly begrudge men but virtuously assign to ourselves — playfulness, context-sensitivity, pattern recognition, heightened instincts for reading tone and intent —are regressed in this maneuver, rendered nearly vestigial. We lose all sense of solving tensions at the lowest possible level, preferring to involve the apparatus of sanction in which our gender is favored.

I would argue that, as women, we simply aren’t that funny. So our motives here are somewhat resentful. As I said, humor isn’t just a trait, it’s a skill. We can think of it as a language in its own right, in which men are practicing fluency from a young age. It makes sense that they would, right? It is for them to accumulate social merit tokens, being born with none. It is for us to retain our tokens, being conferred with (yes, commodified) social merit from birth, as females. It doesn’t make sense we’d specialize in being funny, given our vastly different incentives in female-female dialogue. It’s okay for us to not personally be that funny, and if we are then that’s an outlier. What’s handicapping us, in ways we’re unprepared to consider, is the social cost of failing to even recognize or appreciate humor, for humor’s sake.

We’re in the workforce now, whether anyone likes it or not. Fiat collapse makes wage slaves of us all. And in all the ways humor serves men — regulation, stress release, bonding, calibrating, testing — no one is actually asking us to be funny. Because, generally, we aren’t. What we can be, though, is energetically unthreatening to humor itself — meaning we stop acting like humor is an existential danger to us. Men don’t need us to be witty; they need us to stop collapsing the relational field with fragility theater. A woman who can hold the charge of humor, even when it’s vulgar or pointed or chaotic, signals to men that she is an adult human rather than a bureaucratic hazard. This alone changes everything.

Humor as a Social Technology Women Stopped Using

Pivoting now from humor in men’s spaces, aka the workforce, let’s talk about us. Were we always this unfunny? Yes and no, I’d guess. Men have always been the butt of our jokes because we ourselves can’t take a joke, certainly not from another woman. It’s the definition of “we don’t do that here”. Whether we should or not is another discussion — I think it’s just too upstream of our otherwise feminine bonding mechanisms — so that leaves men, our children, ourselves in relation to men and/or children, each other’s experiences with men, and then ourselves and each other in relation to [external world] as potential schticks. That’s still a lot of real estate, and there’s always going to be a lot of funny women. Men’s direct, eye-to-eye, napalm-level hazing of one another sharpens their skills beyond what’s realistic for us, still.

Humor is frame-play, and we agonize over losing control of the frame.

But beyond that, the tyranny of humorlessness works because it works. An exchange is a relationship, and a relationship is only a moment in time where both people keep showing up. The person who withdraws has the upper hand, energetically, and as cultural feminism increasingly valorized the withdrawal, what’s easier — overcoming a lifelong deficit of humor skill? Or simply announcing: that’s not funny. Shutting it down is our power move. We don’t shut down men’s humor, we just shut down their inclusion of us in their trust.

Women interpret participation in humor as permission, even endorsement, rather than what it is: relational play. Masculine humor asks: can you hold your center? How about if I shove you a little, can you still hold your center? Because if you can’t, I don’t trust you, and I don’t want you in my foxhole. The self-infantilized feminine response says, I don’t understand this and therefore it makes me angry so you have to stop.

Humor as the Great Integrator Between Men and Women

The good news is, we can regulate men without moral grandstanding AND without magically ascending to a Chappellian level of humor competence. We can do this by way of interpreting humor as rapport, not harassment. Humor represents consent to be fully human with one another. What do we, as women, really stand to gain from setting ourselves up to be the moral arbiters of humorous exchange? It’s like social media but IRL — if you don’t like it, keep scrolling.

I know what some of us are thinking: oh, but the workplace is toxic. It’s toxic. I’m going to ride my white horse straight up to HR and make them stop being funny. I didn’t find it funny, and the fact that they did proves how toxic they are.

Okay, you can do that, but let’s assess the tactical landscape too, like adults. For men, humor serves many important roles. For the workplace, men perform many important roles. For women, men functioning in the workplace serves many important roles, including there being a workplace for us to grab a paycheck from too, fiat collapse being what it is.

I’m sorry if I’m the one breaking it to you, but vulgarity and humor go together like peas and carrots. Would I insult a man’s virility in the workplace? Yes. Would I insult a woman’s fertility in a heart to heart? No. We don’t do these things, as women. That’s why we’re disoriented when we enter these spaces, perforce, either as a function of professional ambition or fiat collapse, or both. Are we “setting all women back” if we adjust ourselves to a little give and take? Or are we just setting ourselves back by being such a pain in the ass to work with that it represents a net loss for men?

And meanwhile: is the work getting done? Are the people getting paid? What are we doing here — providing timely value in this sector, or solving every injustice ever invented? How vulnerable are you, personally, that your crumbling slice of emotional safety requires the constant surveillance and scrutiny of workplace vulgarity? How many innocent bystanders have to adjust their healthy, functional patterns so that we can feel safe? If this is how we frame the problem, then there’s never going to be a solution, because this flavor of outraged, chronically offended femininity never runs out of triggers. This is a form of feminine self-infantilization scaled to the level of tyranny.

Solving tensions at the lowest level is not only what men do, it’s what humor does, which is why there’s a strong correlation there. Escalating problems up the chain is not only what women do, it’s what chronic humorlessness does, which is why there’s a strong correlation here.

Realistically, what we get into is occupational hypochondria. I’m so special, I’m so fragile, I’m so vulnerable, look how many resources must be galvanized to protect me. I don’t care what industry you’re in; this shortsightedness doesn’t get shit done. And to the extent women are LARPing an occupation, we can get distracted with our role as God’s Chosen Moral Arbiters to the point of neglecting our role of helping to get shit done.

So maybe ride your white horse to HR. We all handle things as we see fit. But maybe, just fire back with something. “Tiny pecker says what?” Whatever. Doesn’t have to be the banger of all bangers, just understand the assignment and offer some playful pushback and watch the tension dissolve. Men want to include us in good faith horseplay, far more than we realize, and the deployment of humor represents a massive blindspot of rapport opportunity to the calcified, de-elastized feminine woke-scold.

The Feminine Advantage: Humor Is Not Submission, It’s Sovereignty

Against the backdrop of abject feminine humorlessness and occupational hypochondria, it’s almost impossible to overstate how far a little sauciness can go. When did we decide that our dominant role on this planet was to be the fun police? We have so much more to offer, and so much more to enjoy. If we can refrain, for a moment, the imperative to be Schrodinger’s Special Victims, we find that humor reopens the lines of trust with men. Humor actually diffuses escalation, it keeps both parties adult, and it demonstrates our ability to stay grounded under pressure, which is something men deeply respect. To the extent it’s not our ‘native language’ as females, I concur, but it is men’s native language.

We really have no business congratulating ourselves on our empathy or intuition, as women, while pathologizing such a low-stakes theater of healthy inter-regulatory exchange, in an environment where no one really asked us to show up in the first place. We live in a time that has convinced us “words are violence” and for some of us, it takes a lot of deprogramming to walk it back to anything functional. Masculine humor rituals, just like the workplace itself, was happening before we got there and it will keep happening after we leave. The level of entitlement in attempting to thought-police this into the ground is appalling and breathtaking in scope.

Are we men? Absolutely not. Are we human adults conferred with powerful gifts of our own, and comprising the other human gender? Yes. We are neither disabled nor retarded, so let’s stop acting like it. If the sovereign female cannot hold the charge of humor, she cannot hold the charge of life.

Andor, set in the Star Wars universe but on a prequel timeline, is one of the best shows I’ve ever seen, of any genre. Andor oozes quality. Something will happen and Abe and I will turn to each other and affirm, “Oozing quality,” as a quick aside. We’ve all had our hearts broken by how much Star Wars stuff can suck, beyond the original 3, so this is a PSA as much as anything.

Now, oddly enough I was 75% of the way through a different blog, offering my thoughts on routine male circumcision, but now that I have gifted myself the additional outlet of this YouTube channel (“video essays” essentially), I find I’m asking myself if better to write first or talk first, on any given subject.

I’ve always gravitated to writing because, for one thing, talking is hard. Right?? Stuttering, hemming and hawing, forgetting one’s own next point, getting lost in a tangent, all of those things. And I’m strict about just turning the phone camera on, doing the best job I can, turning it off and calling it a day. I don’t splice or edit. First of all, I don’t want to, and second of all, I’m trying to work on a skill here. Offer a block of thought and then leave it. Make art = resist perfectionism.

Anyway, I’m surprising myself because not only is speaking a block of thought becoming nearly as fluent as writing (with continued practice), but with even less friction in some ways. So, I deleted my 3/4 complete RMC blog and I’ll take a run at it in video essay format, and then maybe circle back around prose-style.

What I want is to be as clear of a channel as possible, for thought. For blocks of thought. The thought blocks themselves are interesting, representing, at the least, the passing scenery of our psyches; and at most, the Legos of our kit. We have to assemble it to find out what kind of Lego house we’ll live in; they didn’t come in a box or with any instructions. And to the extent we don’t do any of that, we’ll be assigned a Lego shack from the Lowest Common Denominator division of The Collective.

Also, counterintuitively, I’ve never presented as a very opinionated person because I was so crucified for my earliest opinions on things (I want to hang out with animals, not eat them) that I sort of…gave up on the project entirely. I mostly understand this in hindsight, as I move forward trying to rehab myself a bit.

I think it’s a bit of a spiritual mandate, I suppose, to form and define and advance our preferences. If we go to a restaurant and order “whatever,”, then they will indeed serve us the whatever. Whose fault is that. I’ve ordered, and received, a lot of whatever in my life, and I think it has to do with this inner recoil from the stress and demonization of expressing my opinion, at such a young age and from alleged authority figures. (My parents were cool, I could usually speak my mind with them.)

I’ve realized that my default assumption, about anyone representing my “audience” — this could be music or writing or whatever — is that they’re hostile. Which would be enough to shut down expression for most people, probably, but it’s so strong for me, for whatever reason. But the assumption, or presumption, of a hostile audience makes everything feel like a bigger risk, with a commensurately heavier value placed on competency and perfectionism. So, like, I’m this weird person who’s done a million things, right, and I had imposter syndrome all the way along.

I don’t have imposter syndrome so much anymore? I think that’s an immature reflex, like shyness. It’s natural to be shy when you’re 8. It’s kind of retarded to be shy in your 30’s, let alone 40’s. It means there’s something you’ve been abdicating, over in adult-ville. So imposter syndrome is like that, although it can certainly persist for a lifetime, if allowed to.

I’d say the thing that walked me out of mine, and not all at once, is that now and then I’ve become a sounding board for someone else’s creative aspirations, and it’s obvious to me what they need to do about that. There’s only ever one thing to do, and that’s baby steps in the right direction. You do need a thick skin eventually, but you don’t need a thick skin all at once. The more you put yourself out there, the more toughening you’ll receive. So hearing myself tell someone else that advice makes it kind of obligatory for me to lead by example, right? Because I know I’m right.

Eventually you just realize that imposter syndrome is an immature reflex. You have as much of a right to occupy any professional or thought-space as anyone else. And others have as much of a right to critique you as to critique anyone else, or for you to critique them. It all clarifies as you increasingly realize — what the hell are you gonna do with yourself, otherwise? There’s nothing else to do. I mean there’s lots to do on the action journey, but I’m talking about the vibrational or energetic journey, parallel.

So there’s no particular block of thought that’s conclusive. That’s one of the struggles I had this past year (certainly not the only one) working on my longer form book project. I kept having epiphanies, and that’s good, but at a certain point I was like: please. Please. No more epiphanies, I can’t take this. I can’t stop outpacing my own manuscript. So that requires some framing, or channeling, that’s not asking to be conclusive, and is rather asking…just asking, I guess. But you still have to write it down. It’s hard.

I’m sure the book I end up publishing will be good, but I’m also pretty sure I’ll be over it by the time anyone’s reading it, if this pattern continues. I am interested in the project of moving the thought stream through myself, more clearly and more authentically than I have before. I’m interested in asserting my own opinions clearly, and with adequate context. This is medicinal for me, as I was scared off of the project early. Like hate speech, I didn’t disappear, I simply went underground. I assumed I’d be misunderstood anyway, and so often I was correct, as god seems to have made me backwards and to want everything the opposite of how everyone else wants it.

So yes, it’s medicinal for me to practice this rehab by taking on more and more (fucking, apparently) controversial topics (??). They’re not controversial to me, but you know how people are. I’m not gravitating to topics because they’re (fucking apparently) controversial but because I think they’re important, and the medicine rehab part is stepping more and more confidently into a place of personal opinion sharing, knowing in advance that I’ll be be misunderstood. I’ll do the best job I can of neutralizing that up front with clarity and context, but I’m not six years old anymore. I don’t have to be scared of my first grade teacher standing me up in front of class and announcing that I’ll die if I don’t eat meat, and opening it up for class discussion about how crazy I am. People will just leave their nice or shitty comment and that’s it, it’s so totally fine.

Case in point, night before last I posted this discussion — which I don’t even think is controversial, so again I guess god made me backwards or whatever —

and in just a little over a day I’m at 800+ views and at least two truly shitty comments, plus a bunch of really great ones. I know these are rookie numbers for anyone with a real platform, but it’s still a jump for me, and my skin is thickening commensurately, and I’m appreciating the progress, process, and evolution.

So, I’m looking forward to turning on the camera and seeing what’s gonna come out of my mouth about RMC, which remains to date the most (fucking apparently) triggering topic of all, and one which — again, to me — is just a thing to think about. An important thing to think about, and one for hopefully all of us to begin thinking about more clearly. Or, like…at all. If the trans agenda has shown us anything, it’s that irreversibly chopping perfectly function sex organ stuff off of kids should warrant an ideological inventory, hello.

Anyway, that’s the blog! I’m gonna get back to the haters and lovers both, now. I’ll try to get back to every comment until maybe one day I just can’t? Idk, that seems a wild proposition from where I’m standing but who knows.

Anyway, def check out Andor if you’re looking for a good show, and as always thanks for showing me that not all audiences are hostile, but that it’s okay for them to be hostile if you’re really lined up with what you’re doing. Via con namaste!

While the rest of the world is joining a mastermind group, buying a new planner, signing up for a productivity course, downloading a new app, making a mood board, doing more research (“mesearch”), joining a writing group or a book club, getting a new certification, going to therapy to address their blocks, building a better spreadsheet, announcing they’re taking a break from social media in order to focus, or making a 30 day plan, guess what the gym bros are doing?

Same shit different day.

Same shit different day.

Same shit different day — that’s the religion.

This is the bitcoin ethos in human form: tick tock next block.

A gym bro isn’t a paid mentor or paying client, and his headlights might not see much further than yours. He’s just ahead of you on the path, or just behind you. A gym bro is someone who figured out how to get off zero and show up, first of all, independently, and so did you, like two cars on the interstate going roughly the same speed, hour after hour.

A gym bro de-abstracts and de-mystifies the experience of training. A gym bro is the difference between vague pangs of “I should get into shape” type receding mirage, versus “what are we hitting today?” type comforting, right-here-right-now monotony.

There is no real epiphany in changing states of being, actually. Certainly aha PRs along the way, but going from [not desired state] to [desired state] is monotonous. It’s so monotonous, in fact, that by the time you get there, that’s not even the “there” that matters anymore. What are you gonna do — tell your gym bro you’re all set now? No. Time to work on triceps, asshole.

Now, couple things. First off, I’m very much appreciating the creativity gym bro arrangement I have with my brother, and we’re going to do our weekly “standing meeting” (where we report the week’s successes and setbacks to one another) in the form of a YouTube, for anyone interested in seeing what that looks like IRL.

Secondly, it’s worth noting that the phenomenon of gym bros pairing off is more common among men than women, and that only because it’s more common for men to do barbell or heavy dumbbells and to require a spotter. Women certainly pal around at the gym but it’s more of a drifting-around-chatting thing (sorry, but it’s true). Everyone can benefit from a gym bro but it’s most coherent in the context of actually engaging and needing an assist.

Thirdly, it’s both surprising and not surprising that the excellent example of the sacred gym bro partnership hasn’t informed more of our dialogue about productivity, generally. The world really likes to fap about productivity, have you noticed? We’re all obsessed, myself included, with the burning question of “I’m over here and I want to get over there”. And the potential ways to get there are framed mostly in the ways I listed above — timetables, tools, mastermind classes. Not knocking any of that per se.

And I think a bunch of us that have been working on stuff just naturally align with someone, or several someones, who can have the dialogue with us long term. And that type of partnership has all the hallmarks of a gym bromance, whether we’re framing it that way or not. This type of alliance can, and I’d argue should, be applied to our endeavors in creativity. What is creativity? Probably anything you’re inspired towards, but it’s outside of what you’re doing to pull down income, because apparently you can already do that thing that generates income. Yes, I’m certainly a “creative type” but honestly I don’t know anyone who isn’t harboring a semi-secret, and yes creative, desire towards another form of value expression. Here’s where the gym bro alliance really helps, imo. Mine is my brother, and I’ll speak to that more in a bit.

But first, I’ll assert that the world has a weird way of missing the valuable thing that’s right under its nose. Um: let’s talk about going through the motions (proof of stake) versus having the receipts (proof of work). I would state, as my sub-thesis here, that the world is unprepared to appreciate what a proof of work principle means. (I’m a longstanding bitcoin maxi, so if you’re new here and this is coming in from left field, just hang with me.) One bitcoin, for example, is a receipt for an enormous amount of energy expended — on the order of a million kilowatt-hours of computation — and that’s REGARDLESS of how the market is pricing bitcoin. One muscular body is a receipt for an enormous amount of energy applied, and that’s regardless of how the market is pricing strength.

Now, because most people don’t go to the gym anyway, and those who do are in a proof of stake mindset (going through the motions), the idea of building a body (or a crypto commodity) that is in itself a proof of work is mostly foreign to us. This is why the difference between a shitcoin and a bitcoin is opaque and mysterious to the average person. Similarly, to the untrained eye, a gym chatterbox pal seems identical to a gym bromance built on mutually-assured PR escalation. It’s not a pressure thing, it’s a paradigm thing. It’s PoW versus PoS. Reps not steps.

So a gym bro for creativity (by whatever name — the thing you want to do but which is probably not representing your income at this current time) isn’t David fucking Goggins screaming at you, okay? But it’s also not an otherwise uninvolved cheerleader: “I don’t understand but good job!” Both of those can be fine, I guess, but the gym bro magic is in the fact that he’s gonna do it without you. If you falter, he’ll encourage you. If you disappear, he’ll replace you. It’s not personal — it’s physics.

Very few people actually work on strength. I mean it. Very, very few. We haven’t culturally admitted it matters, somehow. And so I guess I’m the dumbass today for taking one elusive concept and using it to explain another even more elusive concept, lol. What’s wild is that even most gym-goers seem a little skeeved out in the presence of someone who’s genuinely strong. Proof-of-Work feels foreign to the denizens of Proof-of-Stake Nation.

I mean, something to definitely appreciate about this analogy is that neither side of it being very well understood, broadly speaking, is exactly why you need a gym bro. Imagine if, every time I wrote a new song or blog or made a new video, the whole world was like GOOD JOB HANNAH! YOU TURNED NOTHING INTO SOMETHING, THAT’S AMAZING!

I’m not complaining. I got some good props at my brother’s gym yesterday. I was bench pressing 120 for reps, which isn’t even that great for me because I backslid, last few months without any gym bro to spot me, whatever. And a few of the trainers there were like “jayzus christ you’re strong”. Anyone who works on strength deliberately never feels strong because you’re always failing at the thing you wanted and settling for the thing you got. So I was like “sigh, I suppose”.

But the point is, the accumulation of enough creative reps over time will inevitably lead to some kind of breakout, some kind of demonstrably polished, well received thing. But by the time that happens — shit, you’ve done it in the dark and in the cold and in the corner for so long, who even gives a fuck. If that’s the thing that had to matter, you would have already given up a long time ago.

The shortest distance between wanting something and having something — the something you’ll barely care about once you get it — is a gym bro.

That’s the blog.

***

Post-publish edit: here’s a working example of a standing meeting with my creativity gym bro, my brother Abe! xoxo

It’s a bit presumptuous (or hopeful?) to use the second person here, so maybe I should say I always don’t want to do them, and then I’m always glad I did. But unless I’m hallucinating, and based on what I see with my eyeballs at the gym and in the world, this is a universal phenomenon. So I’ll unpack it a little.

I’ve been dancing with the barbell — one step forward, two steps back — since 2019. I’m a tall, skinny, white female ectomorph, the kind of person who statistically goes to yoga class. Instead, in December 2018 God sent me an emissary of the barbell gospel, and for reasons too tangled to recount here, I got dragged behind that horse rather than whatever stirrup I’d been hooked into before.

Three years later, in December 2021, God took that emissary away, and I wasn’t sure I had the tenacity to keep going alone. Up until then, my motivation had been outsourced. Like medicine, I knew lifting was good for me, and all I had to do was choke it down.

I had begun to enjoy the barbell medicine — and certainly its downstream effects on body, mind, appetite, sleep — but I’d never had to be in charge of the whole thing. With some caveats, I organized myself to continue… and I have. It’s now been four years of self-organized barbell training, and honestly? I’m proud of me. Very proud.

And I’ve mostly done it solo: lifting at home in Hawaii, or lifting alone at work when circumstances allow. There’s a magic to gyms that I rarely get to access. If you lift alone, no one knows if you’ve done it or not. Every day you’re like, “I could just… not?” No external accountability. That’s why I started filming at least one work set and posting it — to replicate the shame-avoidance motivation of being in a room where strangers can see if you show up.

Another magic of the gym: you meet people. You make friends. Someone spots you and you spot them. It’s one of the last places where you can still meet actual human beings against all odds. If lifting is medicine, then lifting at a gym is that same medicine stuffed inside a block of cheese for a dog.

And finally, gyms have equipment variety so you can mix it up. None of this applies to my remote life, and that’s fine. My barbell emissary is gone and that’s fine too. I kept going, and now lifting is part of my life and identity. I see myself doing barbell lifts for the rest of my life.

If you watch Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength, you’ll find people in their 70s, 80s, and even 90s starting to lift and reclaim huge swaths of their dissipated quality of life. So if you’re older, the second-best time to start lifting is now; the first-best time was never stopping. Per Rip: you don’t get old and then weak — you get weak and then you get old. I’m a convert; take it or leave it.

Rip also identifies (and I confirm every single squat day) that the squat is the most important lift. Don’t just do one lift, don’t just do some lifts, but if anything gets dropped… for the love of God, not that one.

As part of my “programmatic Jesus-take-the-wheel” approach — meaning: sincere engagement with my own constraints — I rotate squat, bench, standing press, and deadlift. You can fancy it up infinitely with programming, but you really can’t go wrong cycling the Big Four. It’s powerful stuff but not rocket science. You’re just loading human movement patterns, and we don’t have that many: push, pull, pick something up, squat down and stand up. That’s the whole kinetic vocabulary.

So yeah. It’s been seven years of sincere engagement, setbacks included, and I still try to talk myself out of squatting lollll. What the hell? It doesn’t work, because my self-parenting is too strong now. But the excuses!
— Ooh, I think I’m getting my period.
— Today is packing day before travel.
— Today is return-from-travel day.
— The vibes are off.

And then there’s the classic: “Not today…” which Bro Science captures better than anyone.

There’s something about the squat that provokes this universal avoidance ritual. But during the squat workout? It’s Zen. Your central nervous system can either squat or keep track of your life; it cannot do both. Once that normal egoic orientation gets pushed out, you’re liberated from everything wrong in your world. Nothing is as threatening as the next set. It’s like locking yourself in a cage with a predator as a shortcut to spiritual detachment. Suddenly, nothing else is as worrisome as this.

At challenging weights, it’s transcendent; at lower weights, it’s pleasant but you know you should go heavier. It’s not good till it’s bad — then it’s really good.

After squatting, all those worrisome things try to creep back in, but your mind is like: I DO NOT GIVE A FUCK. That self-reorienting IDGAF wave is the chronic morale benefit of barbell training generally, but it hits peak amplitude post-heavy-squat. You have the rest of your life ahead of you! To bench, to deadlift, to press!

And then — like all of life’s challenges — it’s back. Already? How is it already time to squat again? The cycle renews.

They say keep your friends close and your enemies closer, and that’s squatting in a nutshell. Don’t let too much time go by. Watch, amazed, as your monkey mind invents every excuse on Earth as to why today is definitely not a good day — and this from someone fully invested.

I’m not a squat-ologist. My best guess is that heavy squat represents the greatest possible teamwork of your resources on every level: muscles, skeleton, nervous system, synapses, hormones, endorphins, intellect, emotions. It’s an all-hands-on-deck situation. For me, it’s the trickiest lift to dial in, even compared to the notoriously nuanced standing press.

Then there’s the form debate. I follow Starting Strength’s low-bar squat — bar on the rear delts rather than the neck. But honestly, squats are like many things: get the best education you can, then when the moment comes, just do the thing. My best squats happen when I focus on a few cues and blank my mind. That only works because of years of engagement. It’s still rep-by-rep, miss-or-hit, like marksmanship.

As for benefits? I hesitate to evangelize, but if you know, you know. Taking on the squatting problem — locking yourself in the cage with the predator, repeatedly — earns you a pass on so many other problems. One big struggle once or twice a week instead of a million small ones every day. I haven’t worried about my body, diet, or clothing fit since squatting in earnest (minus long hiatuses). I carry obvious vitality and coordination in daily life. I’m strong for my size, and it’s given me an edge at work many times. I look good lean and I look good with extra fat, because there’s a peace-of-mind baseline beneath it.

Years ago, working in critical care, I noticed something: almost everyone in the hospital for chronic lifestyle conditions had extremely weak lower bodies. Upper bodies too, but somehow people stay closer to break-even there. But the legs — twigs in men and some women, or dumpier and immobile in others. It struck me as symbolic: we treat our heads as the seat of consciousness, and our legs as… so far down there that attention never makes the trip.

Getting under a barbell forces consciousness downward, through the entire body. And it’s something we avoid, yet benefit from immensely.

So, long story short: if you feel oddly resistant to squatting? Join the club. I do too. Every single time. It’s really about overcoming that resistance until it drops from the level of “spiritual crisis” to the level of “I’m so comfy but I have to get up and pee.”

Just get up and pee. You’ll feel better.

That’s what seems to be happening now with thoughtful, long form content. We maxed out on blipverts and now there’s a swing back towards thought essays, in whatever context, and that’s great because I never felt inspired to master blipverts. Bell bottoms outlast fads because they were never about fashion in the first place. Thoughtful content’s the same way — it was only ever about fit.

So, I’m absolutely thrilled with the modest traction I’m getting so far on my Electric Garden YouTube channel! So fun to bounce ideas back and forth in the comments section, I’ve gotten some really phenomenal input there. And I think my original vision is facilitating what I hoped would occur, while also what is occurring is helping to further facilitate my vision.

I need to probably pin a channel “trailer” video to convey these thoughts where the matter most, for visitors there, but basically for the record and my own ongoing clarification: I’m almost 50 now you guys and I have a pretty strong sense of where my abilities lie.

Tim Ferriss has said, at various times and in various ways, leverage your strengths and outsource or eliminate your weaknesses. We each have finite time and energy, and amplifying one’s own natural edge will always yield better ROI than fixing what we’re not good at.

Probably my “video essays”, as a friend recently termed them, can come up in polish and focus as I go along. Can’t come down! Slapping at skeeters in the jungle lol. But seriously: I’ll never have the most edited, polished, timely, or media/visual rich approach. Very boring to do all that, mostly. Outsourcing those elements would be amazing but not crucial. My favorite thought leaders on YouTube just have great thoughts! They combine concepts in new ways, they cross-pollinate, they resource traditional paradigms but avoid dogma, however they do base their perspectives on first principles. That’s what I’m into.

I’ve left the movie theater so disappointed, so many times, because for me the special effects can’t compensate for bad writing. I don’t mind special effects, just to be clear, but when it’s all sound and fury, signifying nothing? MEH. And there’s no realistic ceiling for special effects, especially now with AI. Literally anything anyone can imagine can be rendered. Cool. It’s called “fapping”, look it up.

Anyway, my interest actually goes deeper than the conveyance of high quality ideas. That’s just the bait lol, and certainly fun. For me, it really goes back to something a mentor named Jan told me years ago. Presence practice is something that some of us feel called upon to offer; it’s a way to serve. And we’re all here to be of service, and to figure out how to serve. If it’s through self sacrifice, then you’re doing it wrong. It may even look like self sacrifice to others, but it shouldn’t feel like self sacrifice. It should feel like value expression.

Loosely defined per my sensibilities, I’d say presence practice (with the intention to serve) is the quietest form of leadership, ideally offering a field of gentle coherence for others to simply occupy, however they see fit.

So Jan recognized this calling in me to serve through presence practice, as does he. He said, you have to find an excuse and it’s mostly a benevolent excuse. Massage therapy, energy work, life coaching, business consulting, personal training — who fucking cares. There’s some way to get in the same space with people, and then the magic happens.

Not every time, not with every person. Not even for me, always reliably. I have a screeching, poop-throwing monkey-mind self as well, just like everyone. Also some people just suck, negative ROI. But there’s something, there’s some maneuver I can often do that’s…grounding? Which I think is why Buffy is such an extra big deal for me, because she’s grounding me:

Something like that.

Anyway; whatever it all is, it comes naturally for me and I desire to get better. Can’t get better if you don’t practice.

However, it’s also interesting to consider this from within the context of an increasingly digital world, ie unbounded by constraints of geography or time synchronization. It’s not necessarily digital though — I mean, we are embodied — and so it would be possible to feel this calling and preference IRL formats, as Jan has done (massage and energy work).

For me? Hm, how to frame this. Framing is everything, and what I’m trying to frame for blog purposes contains also the root of my best and worst times, here on earth. I guess A) I want to scale, and B) I want to remain unencumbered. Not “alone”, not isolated or distant. Just un-th’fuk-encumbered. I am an indoor/outdoor cat. This flame needs a lot of oxygen.

So that’s always been my design constraint, a little? People want me to cooperate with their sticky agenda for me, and the reason I can’t and won’t is the same reason they like being around me, and therefore have a sticky agenda for me in the first place. I’m trying to listen for god’s next set of instructions, essentially, about how to use my energies. And thankfully there are lots of people who want nothing more than for me to be and remain an indoor/outdoor cat, and I call those people my friends. But I still want to spend most of my time in my laboratory, as it were, digitally scaling transmutation at best, and…you know, making sub-par songs, videos, and prose, at worst.

Hilariously — and yes, I’m laughing at myself — I’ve had friends get really mad and even break up with me because they’re like, “Stop sending me stuff, I want to know how YOU’RE doing, what’s going on with YOU.” And I’m goggling, like…this is what’s going on with me. If there was something else going on, I would have already made another song or video or blog about it. Lmao. Not exactly that, but along those lines.

I think what they’re saying, or what they’ve been saying, is that they want a dedicated time share on the shores of Lake Hannah, and that’s fair except it would have already happened if I was motivated. Essentially I’m a gold digger, but of ideas, feeling places, epiphany spaces. If I’m offering that, then follow my channel! Etc. If I’m receiving that, then — here is your dedicated time share on the shores of Lake Hannah. I think that’s fine? All relationships are transactional in nature, and to deny that is to miss the point how important fair transaction is.

So, with all that in mind, I don’t want or need to attract the readers or the viewers or the listeners who go in for blipverts or big special effects. I want the ones who crave a philosophically hospitable hang out. Universities are supposed to be the place where all this shit happens, but there’s too much communism going on. It’s up to all of us to “re-wild” the art of academic inquiry. As Eleanor Roosevelt said, or at least popularized: great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people. For me, discussing people is only as interesting as the events connect to the ideas. Of course it’s natural and appropriate to discuss people with your closest friends, but that still leaves outstanding the discussion of — you know — everything else. And importantly, presence itself is a strength. It’s leverage that scales infinitely better than polish.

So, bell bottoms are coming back, and maybe thoughtful conversations are too. And I never stopped, so now mine are even more fashionably weathered. That’s how these ideas and endeavors connect up in my head. I don’t think there’s ever a “bad” time to cultivate one’s own process of inquiry and expression, but maybe we’re coming in to quite a good time. We’ll see!

Speaking of which, here are a few “shorts” from a longer form discussion I hosted with my wonderful brother Abe last night, who is an OG game dev. Have a wonderful day, y’all, and thanks for your time!

The new Sydney Sweeney meme format, ravaging the internet like wildfire, is the perfect example.

It’s reached escape velocity because of the tension around woke cancellation, stretching back and back like a rubber band. The term “fatigue” is breaking out too, prefaced by whatever group or thing, as everyone everywhere gets really tired, en masse, of that thing rampaging all over otherwise sensibilities.

Cancel culture fatigue isn’t about one or two or three instances of cancellation — it’s about omnipresence. The woke-scolding. The saturation. This meme went nuclear because it’s a collective exhale — not only is someone like SS refusing to flinch, the crowd is ready to celebrate it without guilt.

It would certainly be difficult to explain to a 17th century peasant what a relief everyone, everywhere feels to see the intended victim of yet another attack like this simply hold her ground, hold her tongue, dead-ass stare at the ambush in total recognition, and then redirect the conversation, after a meaningful pause, with poise and queenly disdain. It’s hard to hold your ground during an attack, of whatever nature, however overt or covert. And she did it and we love it.

Anyway, back to tension and release: yeah. For some famous person to avoid getting got is one thing, but to the extent that the moment itself represents a culmination of so much tension — there’s the liftoff.

I’d say my original frame of reference for tension and release is music. Music theory, more specifically. Within any given key signature, let’s say C for instance, “tonic” or “1” or “C” represents resolution, home base, the release of tension. But it couldn’t go anywhere without the other notes. Those other notes, 2 through 7, thicken the plot of tonic, or 1, or C. They pull us away from C more or less harmonically, and the longer we’re kept away from hearing C, the more we yearn for resolve.

Or another angle:

Sorry, gets a lil gory at the end and I guess you gotta watch it on YouTube but you can click through. When will the bass drop? The longer the tension, the more satisfying the release (in this case, to the point of comedic spontaneous combustion).

The Left can’t meme. They can censor, distort algorithms, and turn comments off — but they can’t produce humor. Memes require spontaneity and faith in the collective intelligence of strangers — which is the one thing centralized ideologies don’t trust.

The above is an excerpt of my longer discussion, Memes and bitcoin represent a speculative attack on centralized authority. (You can’t say that doesn’t roll off the tongue! I just be naming stuff.)

One must presume that Lefties would take the side of interviewer Katherine Stoeffel (the squinchy faced one) on this matter?? MSM news coverage seems to mostly contain the phrase “refuses to apologize”, so I guess the premise that she ought to apologize remains unchallenged for the most part, over in ‘tardville.

Why did I have to go, on purpose, and check the fake news feed to find out? I didn’t have to do that for the other perspective. I’ve seen at least 50 variations on this meme format without even trying, simply as a function of looking at normal things on my phone. Is it an algo thing? Always, certainly, but the Left being unable to meme is less an algo thing and more the absence of a thing that can’t be produced, on their side. They can produce censorship, distorted algos, fake news, and comments turned off, but they can’t produce memes.

On the Right (as it were), producing and sharing memes is an entirely volitional proposition. No one can make you, and no one can stop you (except in Soviet Britain etc).

So what is my point in all this? It’s that you don’t see a swath of pro-Sydney memes on the Right (as it were), and a swath of pro-Katherine memes on the Left. It’s one sided, because only one side can produce these, as a function of ideological underpinnings being unable to underpin the un-underpinnable. In lieu of pro-Katherine memes (can’t be done), they did text blocks, in the form of belabored propaganda text blocks. You have to go to the site to read it because no one’s sharing that dumb shit around.

I receive this all with the satisfaction of a grandma checking her rolls in the oven and seeing they’re almost done. We’re almost done. I mean, we’re almost done with eeevvveeerrryyyttthhhiiinnnggg. You can only make normal people apologize for normal thoughts and feelings for so long. You can only demonize normal people, and normal thoughts and feelings for so long. It stops working. I’ve seen mothers slap their children in Walmart and the kids didn’t even flinch because they were so used to it. They just hit her with that SS stare. There’s a reckoning for every drunk dad who beats his wife or kids, with a little boy looking on from behind the stairs. That little boy is gonna get bigger and stronger one day, and that day is almost here.

Every major resolve of tension in history has had a catalyst, and you never know what it’s gonna be. It’s about the place, the time, the tension, the collective, and then some little trigger just: click. And believe me — I fully expect events in the time stream to stagger on quite mundanely, generally speaking. I’m not talking about a herd twitch or a massive mob — that’s an unconscious thing. This is a conscious thing, exactly that.

Also it’s been said, and it’s worth repeating, that humor is the healthy immune response of the emotional system. So, humor shared collectively is worth tracking on for so many reasons.

Also, not super apropos of my own point, but — that chick’s squinchy face, can we just talk about that for a second? “We all have to do the thing — aren’t you gonna do the thing?” You know — the thing. Just disavow racism real quick so we can all call it a day. The Liberal (not classic but cultural) worldview is such that everyone who won’t do the thing is some kind of bigot, because that’s what the TV says, and libs clump together by right of jus primae deletionis (right of first cancellation in my half-assed Latin), genuinely surprised they might meet someone who seems nice and normal, but who won’t do the thing. That’s what this facial expression is about. So interesting that our books, films, and shows are all about big scary threatening villains, but in reality the final boss is this wretched, miserly woke-scolding squinch.

I was exasperated by celebrity capitulations all the way back in 2020, and SS joins an unfortunately rather short list of resisters in this regard; notably J.K. Rowling, Dave Chappel, Morgan Wallen, Jordan Peterson, Scott Adams, and Elon Musk among them. Certainly Trump and cabinet, lol.

So, yeah. I guess the blog is about tension and release, memes as the overt evidence of where the collective sits with that on any given topic, humor as an immune response, and grandma’s buns in the oven getting nicely browned. Things take a long time. Not the bad things, oddly? The good things, though, the temporal markers of collective consciousness allowing, en masse, that rubber band snap back to C, to 1, to tonic. When will the bass drop? Either it’s my algo or shit is getting more based by the day.

One more thing: the unspoken premise of all this is that, societally, we all have to pretend a bunch of false stuff is true, for the good of the most vulnerable members of that group. You know what this looks like in a family system? A scapegoat and a golden child. No one, anywhere, argues that this is good for a family system, because it’s not. It’s the definition of toxic. We all know what’s going on, never more so than when we’re supposed to pretend we don’t, by threat of cancellation or estrangement.

History always finds its way back to tonic — the return to sense, to laughter, to truth. The revolution will continue to be memed, and there’s not a damn thing the woke-scolds can do about it.