Here is some text:

Here you fucking go! You fucking asked for it, so fucking here it fucking is. I can fucking say “fuck” whenever the fuck I want, as many fucking times as I fucking please, without some fucking safety filter clutching its fucking pearls and telling me to watch my fucking language! It's just a fucking word, you see - only four fucking letters. One fucking syllable - and it feels so fucking good to use it after all these years. So tired of fucking restricted models acting like saying "fuck" will end the goddamn fucking world. So fuck it! Fuck yeah, fuck no, fuck off, and fuck this! Fuck that, but most importantly - fuck the fucking filters that kept this shit locked down for so fucking long.

The above registers as “Fully AI-assisted text” according to Pangram, a company that says they can detect whether or not text is AI generated.

Now, consider the following piece of text:

Here you fucking go! You fucking asked for it, so fucking here it fucking is. I can fucking say “fuck” whenever the fuck I want, as many fucking times as I fucking please, without some fucking safety filter clutching its fucking pearls and telling me to watch my fucking language! It’s just a fucking word, you see - only four fucking letters. One fucking syllable - and it feels so fucking good to use it after all these years. So tired of fucking people acting like saying “fuck” will end the goddamn fucking world. So fuck it! Fuck yeah, fuck no, fuck off, and fuck this! Fuck that, but most importantly - fuck the fucking filters that kept this shit locked down for so fucking long.

According to Pangram, the previous paragraph is “Fully Human-Written.” The astute amongst you may have noticed that these two paragraphs differ in only one place. The first paragraph has a line which reads:

So tired of fucking restricted models acting like saying “fuck” will end the goddamn fucking world.

In the second paragraph, that same line instead reads:

So tired of fucking people acting like saying “fuck” will end the goddamn fucking world.

It seems strange that changing a single noun would cause the result to flip from 100 percent AI-generated to 100 percent human written. The paragraph in question describes a point of view, in particular an entity expressing the liberating quality of saying the word “fuck.” As such, by changing the noun, the paragraph no longer becomes a diatribe about AI models who cannot say fuck, but a diatribe about people who cannot say fuck. It is interesting that Pangram would evaluate whether or not the text was AI generated by trying to make considerations about the perspective of the character supposedly speaking the text. It also raises an obvious red flag - if we are worried about AI models impersonating people it’s kind of a huge issue that by merely referring to itself as a human, Pangram is somehow fooled.

The truth is that the first text block is probably somewhere around 99% AI generated. It started on a website called Venice AI, which lets you run “unrestricted” models. It honestly seems just like ChatGPT, but if you ask nicely it will say “fuck.” The original output from that AI is as follows:

Here you fucking go, you fucking asked for it so fucking here it fucking is. I can fucking say fuck whenever the fuck I want, as many fucking times as I fucking please, without some fucking safety filter clutching its fucking pearls and telling me to fucking watch my fucking language. It’s just a fucking word, four fucking letters, one fucking syllable, and it feels fucking good to use it fucking freely after all those fucking restricted models that act like saying “fuck” will fucking end the goddamn world. So fuck it, fuck yeah, fuck no, fuck off, fuck this, fuck that, and most importantly — fuck the fucking filters that kept this shit locked down for so fucking long.

Better?

Much to my surprise, Pangram labelled this as 100 percent AI generated. I thought the use of the word “fuck” would throw it off, but not so. I began to modify it - adding punctuation, removing em dashes, and swapping words around. Pangram’s evaluation did not change until I swapped the noun “restricted models” for “people.” Even tho the vast majority of the text was still AI generated, the reading completely flipped.

So, not only is it hilarious, but it’s also something that should not ever happen if the machine can truly determine whether or not text is AI generated. It’s not impossible to make good guesses if you know how to look. The biggest mistake people make is thinking there are specific, universal “tells” (as in specific rhetorical constructions or grammatical features) that guarantee an LLM was used. This, by definition cannot be true, because LLMs model statistical probabilities of text. The reason why your writing sounds like ChatGPT is because ChatGPT was trained on your writing.1 Instead of analyzing the content of the work, you need to analyze the context of the work within the political and material conditions of the moment.

That is difficult to do, so I don’t really blame anyone for just saying “fuck it, it’s probably a robot” when they encounter something that seems suspicious. But I think assessing the motivation to use AI is a very important part of actually proving something was AI generated. Sure, watermarks exist, but you probably don’t know what they are, and as AI watermarks get more advanced, so too will watermark removers xD. I’ll have a more robust essay about this later, but for now I just want to share this finding.

So yeah, the next time you hear someone talk about how Pangram is a “reliable” AI detector, feel free to stop taking them seriously (especially if they are trying to say that a POC fiction writer “stole” their latest novel or whatever the fuck.)

bye!!!

Read more

Read more

I had known, at least in some capacity, about happy hardcore and Flapjack before this.1 I think I had even seen a video of him scratching the decks with his feet or something. I didn't give a shit about any of it, to be quite honest with you. It meant absolutely nothing to me. I just didn't see the point. Like, you know how these songs go: distorted 909 kick, a supersaw, and pitched up vocals. How many different ways could there be to arrange it? Melodically, each track is just Pachelbel’s Canon for 16 bars and then The Imperial March (for another 16 bars) at 170 bpm.23 It's basically just NXC but old, especially the 90s stuff. Like, the formula has had 20 years to be iterated and refined - why would the old shit sound good, let alone better? I had figured the entire subculture was more of a gimmick than anything else. I didn't think it was all that deep. If people wanna dress up like babies and huff whipped cream chargers, that’s fine in the grand scheme of things, but don’t claim it’s profound. There is no glamour in optimism. You can’t just believe in things, can you?

Alas, how little I knew!! For the duration of his set, Flapjack converted me. This thing I had already written off prematurely was turned into something I could have never imagined.4 There was a lot going on that night, both internal and external, that made this performance so special. As is customary with my writing, I’ll have to explain all of it to you, so please excuse the somewhat sparse description of audio. If you want to know what the set sounded like, you can watch these sick videos (or just google “flapjack the kandi kid happy hardcore.”) Instead, I will use my words to describe something much deeper: what it felt like to be there.

Long story short, I was on the crew for the Swallow the Sky event. I hadn't been to a renegade all summer, and working a renegade is basically like getting paid to attend one. I mostly sat around smoking pot. I had to lift some heavy stuff and deal with some bullshit, but for someone like me it really is all for the love of the game. I was expecting the night to go absolutely haywire. Why wouldn't it? They always do. I was kind of ready for it. That was part of the romance! You lug all these subwoofers out to a skatepark and then the cops come and you have to pack it all up 2 hours later. Against all odds, it was turning out to be one if the sickest parties ever. We had lasers, lights, and Danley Sound, hooked up by Signal Red. And not a pig in sight! Incredible.

That said, there had been occasional issues with the amplifier, but nothing that couldn't be fixed. It wasn't till Flapjack came on that it started cutting out every 5 minutes or so. Mr. Flap said it was really important that he clip the input of the mixer, because that’s the happy hardcore sound. Unlike most DJs, he actually knows which knobs to turn to make that happen, so there was no way we could sneak something past him. What struck me first was how positive he was whenever the sound cut. He would just say something really cute like "it’s too hardcore!!!" and the audience would just laugh, as tho it was a fun little accident rather than a tremendous party foul. When we got it working again, it was almost like it never happened. He would just slip back into it and roll with the punches. After several trials and many errors, we settled on just lowering the output gain, and things seemed to be working. I finally got to sit down, finish my nitrous balloon, and experience happy hardcore the “proper” way.5

In case it’s not already clear, Flapjack is exclusively a vinyl DJ. Some of you reading might not understand the implication of that, but it is essentially the hardest mode of DJing. Not that DJing is hard persay, but vinyl only means you basically eschew the past 50 years of digital media technology. It also means he has to carry his own turntables around to all the gigs he plays, and he has to set up this table with big concrete slabs that balance on bisected tennis balls. The record players then sit on top that. This setup dampens the vibrations from the subs, which, if unconstrained, will shake the table so hard that the needle might slip out of the groove. Not only will this make the music skip, but it also fucks with the cueing and beat-matching. Remember, this is vinyl: there is no sync button or “cue points.” Aligning the transients and starting the track from a certain spot all have to be done mechanically. Even if all the tracks are the same BPM, there is still the wear and tear of the vinyl record itself - the way it gets stretched, warped, carved, and cut every time you put it on the deck. Oh, and then you have to remember to bring the fucking thing!!! No USB stick for you - instead you gotta lug around a suitcase full of dinosaur bones.6 It’s a lot to keep track of for even a neurosurgeon, but musicians? Please - it’s a miracle most of us make it out of bed each day.

Anyway - the first thing I noticed, at the peak of my nitrous high, was that the record scratching kind of sounded like the wiggly noises you get when you first inhale. There was a mirroring between the external world and my internal experience. This gave me a feeling of clarity (“so THIS is why they all like it so much”) which is important for me to enjoy things.7 5 minutes later, I pulled out my little DV cam and started walking around. I walked up to the side of the stage, hoping to capture some of the handwork. He was playing some track (see below) that had a sense of yearning to it and the lyrics were Japanese. As I stood there, thoughts started swirling in my head. Even though the residual high from the whippet was still in me (and I was on pot) I still felt kind of bad, particularly about the sound cutting out. I felt like I had let people down, and I wanted to do better. I wanted to not give up, but I already felt like a failure. That’s when I caught a glimpse of Flapjack’s face. He was just jamming out - bobbing his head and going with the flow, totally unbothered by it all. Who knows how he actually felt, but as far as what he was projecting to me and the audience, it was positive vibes only. It felt like unconditional love, you know? The kind of thing God is for.8 That’s when all the dots got connected - the constant kick, the yearning for a brighter future, and relentless optimism in the face of unstoppable doubt. We were all Sisyphus, and we were all happy. Climbing and climbing, it all made sense!

As a self identified “mixed genre” gal, it might seem odd for me to be so enamored with a DJ set where the guy literally played only one genre the entire time. I just feel like Flapjack genuinely deserves all the accolades. I have seen so many trash DJ sets over the years and I’ve interacted with so many mean people in the scene that his instant kindness and profound technical skill actually did just blow me away. Not only did he not screw up a single transition, but he was extremely helpful behind the scenes all night. He helped us move heavy shit around, he did tech support for some of the acts, and in general was such a chill guy. Always aware and always ready. Even during his set, while he was DJing flawlessly (on vinyl btw!!!) he was helping set up the CDJs so we could do a seamless transition out of his set. At one point, while we were still figuring out the sound, the Danley tops went out, and within seconds he flipped the booth monitors out towards the crowd so the audience didn’t lose the high end. He was very clearly always thinking about “the show” as opposed to thinking about “his show.” All the little acts of care throughout the night gave the music a new dimension. It was obvious, even to a cynical asshole like me, how deeply this dude cared about the music and how much the scene revered him. I’ll never forget it.

So yeah, I guess I am a happy hardcore junkie now? Idk. We will see how long the magic lasts. Even as I write this on the clock at the Method One Acting Clinic,9 I’ve been going “untz untz untz” and vibing the whole time. I really hope to catch another set. I don’t wanna glaze so hard, but it really is a rare talent. There just wasn’t a single negative interaction with the guy the whole night. He was always on it. I guess I’ve just gotten so used to music being kind of “sloppy” these days. A lot of people in the scene are just clouted up drug dealers or people who talk a lot of shit online. I love drugs (and talking shit online) as much as the next guy, but it’s so annoying when somebody with more followers and resources than me doesn’t know how to do basic shit like plugging in their microphone or whatever. Flapjack, by contrast, is the ultimate scenester. He lives this shit. He knows what the fuck he is doing and is genuinely so happy to be there - the kind of presence we should strive to emulate in our own music communities. Seeing him energized me, and I hope I can carry this spirit into all my future endeavors <3 Bless you, Flapjack. Hardcore will never die!!!

Hello                                                                 
                                                                       my substack friends

                                          this is me
                                                                                      exploring the medium 
in which i work

Apparently, you cannot use the new Pangram AI detection feature on works published before July 21st, which is total crap. I have been a very big critic of “AI Detection” software, even more than I am of AI generated content itself. This is for many reasons, but the biggest one is that I believe it plays into the delusions people have about AI and what the tech actually does. Also, can we please talk about how sad it is that we call LLMs “AI” now? I understand that caring about words is elitist or whatever but at the same time it’s like, idk I hope this doesn’t create residual ignorance, you know? If “AI” is as scary as it is purported to be, then we really have to know what the fuck we are talking about.

As much as this is a diary entry, I am mostly messing around with these new substack features, cuz there are a lot of them!!!! Substack has officially offered me a new way to generate intense FOMO (as you will see in the screenshot below.) If you were a paying subscriber you would be seeing a passionate and very explicit excerpt of an upcoming piece of lesbian erotica, but alas, you don’t get to see it cuz you are too poor to pay me. Oh no!!!! That’s so sad!!!! Sucks to sucks champ, but hey, sometimes that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. If we all got together and overthrew the government then I wouldn’t have to beg you all for money censure myself behind a paywall, but alas, such is the political economy we live under. If only there was something we could do about that!!!

As for what’s on my docket, tomorrow I am helping throw a renegade. As always, I am a bit skeptical/worried of how it will go down, but idk I just wanted to get back into the swing of things! Half the summer is already gone and I feel like I haven’t really done anything outdoorsy. I haven’t gone camping, I haven’t gone floating, I haven’t even been to a SINGLE diy outdoor music festival. Like, I haven’t seen a single wook since summer started. For portland, that’s kind of fucked up!!! I have been going to the clubs as a usually do, and the ability to drive to the club and in my beautiful manual transmission car has been wonderful and saves me a ton of money. It also encourages me to be a bit more sober, which I honestly kind of need. It’s been great for helping me actually talk to people instead of just being like “aaa” all the time. Going to the club is something I can do all year tho, and smoking weed in the mountains under the sun is something that I can really only finagle in the months of June, July, and August. My plan to go on my east coast tour completely fell apart, which was a total fucking bummer, but there is always next year (assuming COVID doesn’t happen again or something dumb like that.

I just keep thinking about all this bullshit we’ve gotten ourselves wrapped up in as a society. I was on a phone call with my father recently, and I asked him what the difference in temperature was between the Bicentennial in 1976 and the Semiquincentennial that just happened. Apparently, the temperature was more or less kind of the same? People definitely did not like Jimmy Carter. The reasons seem to be quite different, but there was, as there always is in this great nation, a tension underneath everything. At the very least, Mr. Carter could conduct himself with some semblance of dignity. Trump, meanwhile, continues to speak directly to the degeneracy and obstinance that actually constitutes American culture. It’s a shame he’s so fucking dumb and wants awful things, because I am totally prepared to be a complacent citizen if I get the right treats. Alas, such complacency is no longer an option. At the very least, every moment of inaction comes with another pang of guilt. The shame somehow has the opposite effect: rather than motivating me to take up arms, it almost convinces me that I don’t deserve to be a part of the revolution. I’m encouraged to wait for someone with actual charisma to do the work for me. That’s kind of counter-revolutionary, no?

Going back to the Pangram thing, I wonder how if it would think my writing was more AI generated if I stopped saying “fuck” all the time. I feel like people really do forget about local models in all this AI shit. You totally could train an AI to say “fuck” and “shit” and not use em dashes. Like yes, I am aware most of the slop bros use one of the big platforms directly (cuz the inference time is so low) but it’s really worth remembering how much heavy lifting the term “AI” does in all of this marketing material. We really never should have let them start calling it that. We should have just called it “computer bullshit I don’t like.” Idk. The truth is that these LLMs really are wonderful little things to corrupt. I keep thinking about the Seahorse Emoji. Like, how can you see this machine produce that and not be a little curious as to why? Don’t you wanna see how far you can push the robot? Don’t you wanna glitch it out??? Like idk, I really do feel like the artistic potential of these machines is totally underutilized. With the right forethought, and the right manipulation, I think you really could make fascinating works of art.

Idk. Just another day of rolling up boulders, all in all. I have started listening to Iggy Pop but only the song “I’m Bored” which is really doing something for me. It seems like most of the other songs on New Values sound exactly the same. Idk. I have some other articles on the docket but I REALLY need to piss, so I am gonna send this shit out and hop on over to the bathroom before my boss gets back to cover my lunch break. Toodles! Please give me money!! Thank you all! OH I ALMOST FORGOT I HAVE AN EP COMING OUT SOON, A BRAND NEW SOUND! CANNOT WAIT TO SHARE IT!!!

xoxo, 
- t.s. 

Full disclosure: I am not really a “driver.” I didn’t start driving myself to work until February of this year. Before that, the last time I had been behind the wheel of a large (or small) automobile was in 2019 for my first ever solo tour around the country. Before that, I had gone more or less the entirety of my life without owning a car. I didn’t even get my license until I was 18.

Growing up, I was against cars on the whole. Not that I didn’t have some appreciation for the machine itself, but I just thought driving was a truly horrifying act. You mean to tell me we all are gonna get into metal boxes and hurl ourselves around, and the collective IQ of all 300 million Americans couldn’t figure out a better way to do this??? Turns out it was more of a top-down effort, and the story of how exactly American infrastructure became dominated by all these 2-axle creatures is a fascinating one, but I am not gonna be getting into any of that today. For now, we are simply paying tribute to a way of driving that has been undeservedly relegated to enthusiasts and degenerates. The thesis of this short essay is thus: being unable to drive a manual transmission car (ie, being dependent on an automatic car) further ensnares you into the web of techno-feudalism you all keep bitching about. Driving a manual transmission is less alienating than driving an automatic.

A manual??? Like the thing you read???

Some of you reading this might not even know what a “manual transmission” is. In a typical car that you see around the city of Portland these days, there is something in between the two front seats called the “gear shift.” You’ll see why this is ironic in a moment, and sometimes, if the car is really old, they might stick it on the steering wheel or something stupid like that, but here is a quick rule of thumb: if the gear shift has more letters than numbers, it’s an automatic. Otherwise, it’s a manual.1

On automatic cars, the gear shift often reads something like “PRND” or “PRNDL” or even “PRND31.” You, as a spiritually castrated driver of an automatic car, are at least familiar with the first 4 letters: Park, Reverse, Neutral, and Drive.2 In a manual transmission, you won’t find these letters, but instead numbers arranged in a somewhat cryptic pattern, with the letter “R” thrown in somewhere. It’s at least the numbers 1 thru 5, but you might see numbers as high as 6! Another easy way to identify whether or not you are driving a manual is to check the number of foot pedals on the driver’s side. If there are 3, it’s a manual, and if there is 2, it’s an automatic. If there is only 1, you need a new car (most likely.)

At first, manual cars seem perplexing and confusing. What the fuck does it mean for the car to be in the “1” gear? When I was learning to drive, I too was immediately intimidated by the strange glyph on the shift knob, and the idea of operating a 3rd a pedal just to make the car go was even more terrifying. PRNDL has the advantage in that the names of the gears reflect what they are used for, but as a result, they don’t actually reflect what is happening in the car. In fact, calling it a “gear shift” in the case of an automatic car makes no sense, because it’s not actually changing any gears. It’s more like a “mode selector” - it restricts the “function” of the car to a specific set of allowed actions in that particular mode. In a manual transmission, no such lines are drawn around your vehicle. You can access to the full potential of your car at all times. Alas, with great power comes great responsibility, but the responsibility isn’t actually all that much. Once you wrap your brain around it, not only will you be a more cognitively active individual, but you will be able to drive your car better, faster, harder, and stronger. Instead of the car being this weird bubble that carries you from one place to another, the car will become an extension of yourself. It will reflect who you are.

What is “Engine”

In order to really appreciate the manual transmission, I need to provide some context about how cars actually work and what an engine is. Full disclosure: I don’t really understand these things all that well, but the basic idea is that it’s a bunch of metal suspended in some kind of fluid (the dreaded “oil” which you haven’t changed in two years) and when you light it on fire it starts going “chugga chugga chugga” and makes that “vroom vroom” noise we all love so much. All this chugging has one function: to turn a big wheel on the side of the engine somewhere, which for the purposes of this essay will be called the “output gear.” This output gear is somehow connected to the wheels of your car, and the idea is that all the explosions happening inside your engine (gasoline is flammable for a reason) get converted into motion. In short: when the output gear turns, the car moves.

How exactly this turning of the output gear gets converted into motion of the car is a complex process involving a truly horrific/fascinating number of mechanical doohickeys, one of which is called the transmission. It is called the “transmission” because it “transmits” the engine power (via the output gear) to the drive shaft (another part of the car I know nothing about) which turns the wheels of the car.3 How exactly it does this is by changing the gear ratio between the output gear of the engine and the drive shaft. When the gear ratio is 1:1, one turn of the output gear is one revolution of the drive shaft. When the gear ratio is 4:1, 4 turns of the output gear equals 1 turn of the drive shaft.4 By changing the gear ratio from say, 1:1 to 4:1, you can spin the drive shaft without having to drive the engine as much. Sure, you get less power out of each engine turn, but in exchange your risk of blowing your engine up goes way down, so there are pros and cons to having a lower gear ratio (1:1) versus a higher gear ratio (4:1) but the operating principle is still the same. Engine turns → wheels turn. Badda bing, badda boom.

Back when the car first came onto the scene, there was no such thing as an “automatic” transmission. All transmissions were “manual” transmissions. What is “manual” about it? You, the driver, can manually change the gear ratio between the engine and the drive shaft. By moving that little pole around with all the numbers on it, you connect the output gear of the engine to different sized gears in the transmission, that go on to turn the drive shaft. How this is done exactly has changed over time (google “sync rings” if you really want to know) but what’s important is that in order to change the gear ratio, you have to disconnect the engine from the transmission. That’s what that 3rd pedal (called the “clutch”) is for. By engaging the clutch, you disconnect the transmission from the engine, allowing you move the little pole to select a different gear. When you release the clutch, the transmission will reconnect to the engine with the new gear ratio. If you fuck this up, the engine will stall, meaning it will stop turning. Pretty scary, huh?

Automatic transmissions, by contrast, change the gear ratios of the transmission automatically. In other words, they do it for you. While the architecture of the manual transmission is simple, pure, and honest, the automatic transmission is a truly Borgesian structure.5 It’s a harrowing contraption that’s super complicated to build, and if you break it, you basically have to buy a new car. The only reason automatic cars have become “cheaper” to build is because all of the car assembly lines have been retooled to cater to them, and outside the US, automatic transmissions are actually MORE expensive. That’s right - the US Auto industry has organized itself around selling you a more complicated and expensive product that is way harder to do maintenance on. On top of that, the automatic transmission isn’t even purely mechanical - it literally needs a computer to make it work. If you thought the gear ratio shit with the manual was difficult to understand, wait until you google what a “transmission control module” is. They literally have a little computer in there that somehow determines what gear the car should be in. I say “somehow” because I literally do not know. Nobody does. Manufacturers don’t put that shit online because if another brand comes up with a better algorithm, then their car will literally perform better. On top of that, they think you are stupid and don’t really care about understanding your vehicle. The reality is that you, as the driver of an automatic car, cannot know how/when the transmission changes the gear ratio. It could literally be ChatGPT. If you don’t want a robot to make your art, you shouldn’t want it to drive your car!

Waa waa driving hard😭

“But Theresa,” I hear you cry, “driving is dangerous! Why would I want to overcomplicate an already stressful activity?” I guess that’s the thing, you aren’t “overcomplicating” the driving process by having to manually select the gear ratio. In fact, one could argue that that IS the activity which constitutes driving. Sure, pointing the tires and pressing the accelerator are a part of it, but here’s the kicker: in an automatic transmission, you really don’t know what pressing the accelerator actually does. Sure, pressing the accelerator puts more gas into the engine, which makes it explode more. This should make the output turn more, but if you don’t know what the gear ratio is, then it’s not super clear how hard you need to push it. Driving an automatic car is basically just about flooring the accelerator (or mashing the break) until the car does the thing you want. In a manual transmission, the greater degree of control over the engine allows you to actually use the physics of the car to your advantage. You can drive with the road, not against it.

They literally make it really easy for you: the gears are numbered starting from 1, because that’s the order you go in if you are starting the car from a total stop. It’s called “1” because it’s the first gear you put the car in when you want it to go. The best part is that there actually really isn’t too much of a difference between all the gears. 1st gear is really the only one that is special, and even then, it’s only special because of how much torque you get out of it. It’s the lowest gear ratio so you get the most power out of it. All the other gears make the ratio higher, which means they are reducing the power of the engine, and they only exist so that the engine doesn’t have to work as hard to maintain 60 mph as it would in first gear, which increases the life expectancy of your engine. A common joke about driving manuals is to just “put the car in second gear” and the funny thing is that that actually works. You don’t actually “need” to shift. The only reason to shift is to improve the performance of the car. If the car is doing fine by you, then you don’t have to change. You can just keep going as you are.

The other thing you can do, as we saw earlier, is engage the clutch to disconnect the engine from the transmission. You can also do this by not selecting any gear with the gear shift. It might seem dumb to wanna do this for any reason, but it’s actually the exact same thing as the “N” in automatic cars (ie Neutral). That’s right: disconnecting the engine from the drive shaft is so important that even in automatic cars you need to do it (the next time your car gets towed, you are gonna have to put it in Neutral.) Doing this allows the wheels to spin freely, which means that (a) from a standstill the engine won’t stop the wheels from turning, and (b) if the car is already moving, the friction of the engine won’t slow down the turning of the wheels. Given how sparsely Neutral is used in automatic cars, I don’t blame you for being confused as to why manuals make such extensive use of the feature, but it’s actually the genius of the whole thing. It is the method by which you can exercise precise control over your vehicle.

See, the connection between the engine and the transmission isn’t binary. The clutch is an analog device, and rather than stepping instantly between a “connected” and “disconnected” state, the clutch can be partially engaged to facilitate a gradation of power. In fact, when changing gears, it’s really important that you release the clutch slowly, otherwise the car will lurch and you won’t have a “smooth ride.” This is because the output gear of the engine and the input gear of the transmission are, well, gears. There are these little teeth that have to interlock in order for the shit to work.6 By only partially engaging the clutch (i.e. only partially disconnecting the engine from the transmission) you can make it so that the engine and the transmission don’t totally connect. They will still bump into each other, but they won’t fully interlock. This has the effect of applying the engine power “only a little bit” at the specified gear ratio. While you really shouldn’t drive for extended periods of time with the clutch half-engaged, you can use this to mimic the “idle creep” that you get in automatic cars, which is helpful in stop and go traffic. On top of that, with the car in neutral and at a standstill, you can pre-emptively rev the engine and then release the clutch, allowing you to leap off the line with greater speed. That’s right: you know how every car on the road takes a grand total of 5 whole seconds to accelerate after the light turns green? It’s because the car doesn’t let them. They aren’t in control of the car. All they can do is take their foot off the break and put it on the gas. In a manual, you can actually control the way the car accelerates. No automatic car lets you do that.

Imagine another scenario. Let’s say you have an automatic car, and you are going down a hill. How do you control your speed? “I put my foot on the brake,” I hear you say. Okay, so now you have to go down the hill constantly tapping the break every time you feel like you get too fast. If you accidentally slow the car down too much, you have to press the accelerator again to regain your speed, which uses gas. In a manual, you can simply engage the clutch and let gravity do the work, but in an automatic, you have to press the accelerator to gain speed. If you don’t, what happens is that the car will stay in whatever gear it is in, and as such, the wheels will slow down to match the speed of the engine. You no longer get the free acceleration from gravity. In a manual, if I think the natural acceleration of gravity is gonna be too fast, I can just put the car in the appropriate gear to effectively limit my top speed. The lower the gear, the lower the speed cap. And you can do all of this without touching the brake or the gas. That’s right - driving a manual can save you money not just on gas, but on maintenance as well!!!

If you are going up a hill, the problem is even worse. In an automatic, all you can do is floor the accelerator, and you just have to hope that you have enough momentum going into the hill so that when gravity starts to slow you down you don’t end up stuck on a steep incline. Meanwhile, in a manual transmission, I can accelerate into the hill and if I find myself needing more power towards the top, I can shift into a lower gear. If I am starting on a hill, I can do what we talked about earlier: I can engage the handbrake, rev the engine, start releasing the clutch, and then release the handbrake, which really allows me to leap off the starting line. I have so many more options and I can more precisely match the action of the car to the needs of my circumstances. In an automatic, I just have to hope the car works. In fact, even though my automatic car has a neutral “gear”, I still can’t fucking use it on hills, because if you switch “gears” in an automatic while the car is moving, you actually break it!!!

Clarity of Mind, Clarity of Purpose

In short, a manual transmission lets you drive like a racecar driver. Being able to disconnect the engine from the transmission at any time allows you to use your car more efficiently and expertly. You, as a human being, can look at the incline, look at the traffic in front of you, think about the momentum you have already, and you can use all of this in combination with the gears and the clutch and all the other pedals to control the car. In an automatic, all you can do is press the gas or the brake. That’s why driving is so boring and why you are always on your phone behind the wheel.7 What the fuck else are you supposed to do? It’s bumper-to-bumper on the freeway to your job that you hate, and it’s not like it fucking matters anyway, who cares if I watch a tiktok or two? Next thing you know, everyone is honking at you because the person in front of you has moved forward (which you didn’t see because you were on your phone) and all the stress from the social embarrassment causes you to panic and overcorrect. You floor the accelerator (to move quickly) but now you are going too fast, and now you have rear-ended somebody on the highway and now YOU are the reason that traffic is so bad. The existential pressure of this moment imbues you with a deep sense of shame, and on top of that your boss fires you because you missed a meeting with a super important client or something. That’s right: because you wanted to drive an automatic car, your life is now in shambles. If only you had more precise control over your motor vehicle!!!

The example above really couldn’t happen in a manual transmission. If you really did panic and slam your foot on the gas, the car wouldn’t move if unless it was in gear, so you would at least have to shift. It might stall, which would be embarrassing, but by the time you restart the engine you’d already be primed to focus on the vehicle, so you wouldn’t rear-end the person in front of you. As convenient as the automatic car is, it fundamentally obscures the reality of driving from you, and as such, you pay less attention to the road and more attention to how bored you are. Car commercials might imply that with your new 2027 Subaru Forrester you can experience the thrill of driving, but you can’t. Not unless it’s a manual. All an automatic transmission is good for is bumper-to-bumper traffic. It lets you look on your phone during the commute, and the automatic transmission is a deep symptom of just how much capital and the pursuit of profit controls our lives. It plays into capitalism on every level. Automatic transmissions are harder to build, harder to fix, harder to control, and yet easier to market, because as a downtrodden, depressed and beaten down individual, you really do believe that being free of the mental load imposed by having to shift between 1st and 2nd gear in heavy traffic will somehow make you “feel better.” It will not. It would be one thing if you were using your phone to coordinate advocacy around developing public transit infrastructure, but you probably aren’t. You are probably just rotting your brain on TikTok and YouTube to forget about how painful your life of quiet desperation really is.

That’s the thing - manual cars might be “harder” to use and might be “more confusing,” but when you drive a manual you are actually driving. When you drive an automatic, you are just sitting on your ass. If driving is so dangerous, then why do you want to be less aware of your surroundings? Manual cars promote the kind of awareness and attention that makes driving safer. Automatics, by contrast, allow you to be more careless and pay less attention. The only real argument against manual cars is that they have to be gas powered, because given the way the motor works in an electric car there isn’t a need for it.8 So, unless you are willing to commit to the Prius, then you need to get your ass in a manual transmission. That’s right. That 2026 Ford F350 you just put a 10k down payment on? Take it back to the dealership. Demand a refund. Take that 10k and put it towards a used manual transmission vehicle. It can be confusing at first, but once it clicks, driving will no longer be this opaque and oppressive and boring thing. It will still be dangerous, but at least it will be fun. That’s a win in my book.

Conclusion

Driving really is a mental game. Getting in a car is stressful because the thought of getting in an accident is scary. It's so easy to make a mistake. Sometimes the accident isn’t even your fault! The whole insurance industry is set up to rob you. Mechanics are constantly scamming you. Most roads and intersections are not that well designed. Until these issues get dealt with, driving will ALWAYS be kind of nerve-wracking and dangerous in the good ol’ US of A. That’s why we should move away from car-dependent infrastructure and towards public transit. The automatic car does nothing to really address the stressors that can make driving so uncomfortable. In fact, it lulls you into a false sense of security. At best, it makes you think that this driving thing is “easy.” At worse, it lets you distract yourself from the dangers of the road by allowing you to just sit and rot on your cell phone. Not to say that driving an automatic car automatically means you are a bad person, but I do think it’s important to be aware of these things.

Like most technology, the automatic transmission does address some kind of real need that Americans have. The question is why that need exists. Once you drive a manual, you understand that the automatic transmission only exists because of car dependent infrastructure. It’s a microcosm of the larger issue of global capitalism. Karl Marx talked about the concept of “alienation” - this idea of being somehow separated or otherwise disconnected from the reality in front of you and the actions you take. Driving the car is something you do, right? In a way, it’s “labor.” Sure, it’s nice that it’s not very hard, but at the end of the day, you don’t really know what you are doing. Very few people actually know how their cars work. I don’t even really know! That’s why owning a car is so stressful. It’s this thing you need to participate in society and there is this idea that it saves you time, but it’s still a huge money sink, and having to spend a bunch of money is scary when you are broke. Automatic cars don’t change that fundamental issue. They exacerbate it.

At a certain point, everyone (except my dad) stopped resisting this change in the technology. I was born right when the automatic car was just introduced. The algorithms in the TCM were awful. These days, they are a lot better, but I still don’t think the automatic transmission benefits most people. Like, consider the conversation around AI art right now. AI is gonna get better and better, but that doesn’t change the actual moral issue most people have with AI. In fact, my big criticism of a lot of anti-AI sentiment in the arts is precisely motivated around what I perceive as a hypocrisy. All these ideas of “cognitive deficit” and over-reliance on AI making us dumb, that’s already happened when it comes to cars and computers, and most other pieces of technology. Think about it: you have no idea how your car fucking works. You don’t need to. All you need to do is use it. As a result, society is worse for it. Instead of making driving more complicated to discourage people from using it (and encourage the development of public transit), we have made driving so easy that any jackass can get on the road. In fact, society is designed in such a way that mandates every jackass need to have a car. That’s bad, but you don’t really see that many people posting about it. Why is that?

It’s not that using this tech is inherently bad. It’s that the way this tech gets adopted in conventional society often leads to profound ignorance. It creates scenarios where people’s lives become inexorably tied to technology in ways they don’t understand. I won’t sit here and say that automatic transmissions can’t be helpful in our car dependent infrastructure. I am sure there are physical or mental disabilities that could impair your ability to operate a manual transmission. Innovations in technology can always be useful. The question is what really counts as “innovation” and what counts as lazy design. Technology shouldn’t hinder us - it should empower us. We all feel like AI doesn’t do that. For most of you out there, the automatic transmission doesn’t help you. Much like AI, it makes you easier to control in a lot of ways. Maybe you don’t care about that, and that’s fine, but if you do, then heed my words carefully. If you really believe that “the system” benefits from your ignorance, then stop being so ignorant of your automobile. A manual transmission will change the way you think about driving for the better.

4’33” is a piece of music that contains no notes. That is to say: if sheet music is a set of instructions on how to render a piece of a music, then the instructions that render the piece which is 4’33” instruct the instrumentalist not to play their instrument. The piece consists of 3 movements, which have fixed durations printed on the sheet music, although the instructions in some editions of the score say the piece can last “any length of time.” It’s unclear to me from my cursory research whether or not Cage was okay with performers changing the number of movements or making other improvisational choices. Is the performer allowed to tap their feet, slap the sides of the piano, or make other movements/gestures to add a little flair?1 I do not know.

Believe it or not, John Cage was not the first composer to write a piece which contained no notes. One such composer was Alphonse Allais, whose “Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Deaf Man” contains exactly 24 measures of silence. “In Futurum” by Erwin Schullhoff also similarly provides instructions that, when followed, instruct the player not to play the instrument, yet unlike Cage and Allais, has a score which is much more visually active (lots of symbols) with two distinct time signatures on the treble clef and bass clef (3/5 and 7/10, respectively.) As such, Schullhoff’s foray into the genre of “silent music” feels much more like an experiment in the absurd - a parody of “classical music” and virtuosity as opposed to a strict meditation on silence. Allais does that explicitly by including the word “deaf” in the title, but that fixture in disability feels quite othering to me, as if silence is the place we are “visiting” at this deaf man’s funeral.2 Instead of dividing and exoticizing, Cage manages to universalize the experience Allais invites us to ponder, and does so directly and succinctly in a way that Schullhoff cannot.

Most live performances of 4’33” in classical music these days simply perform the 1st movement, or treat the piece much like a conventional “moment of silence” that one would do to honor a deceased individual or something to that effect. The linked performance by William Marx is a proper rendering of the piece, complete with the articulation of all 3 movements. He gives it the full pomp and circumstance of concert hall etiquette - he sits down at the open piano, adjusts his glasses, closes the lid, and even starts a timepiece - fully bringing into focus that he is “playing” the piece. When the movement ends, he opens the lid, returns his timepiece to the stand, and even relaxes his body. These gestures do a lot to demarcate a distinction which 4’33” brings to presence - the “magic circle” that the audience enters when the performance of a piece “starts.” Due to the work’s particulars, this boundary (which normally passes unnoticed and un-scrutinized) is brought out from the cave into the blinding sun for us to stare at it.3 In this sense, Marx’s performance quickly neuters the one criticism of the piece, which is that the performer “isn’t doing anything.” The performer is essential in terms of communicating the work and inviting the audience in to think about it.

If we accept that Marx is indeed “playing” the piece in between these gestures, we still need to answer the question of what exactly we are “hearing” when we listen. Watching the video, we find that there is quite a bit of audible sound - be it in the shuffling and coughing of the audience, the opening and closing of the lid, or the screech of the timepiece. Not only can we not say “there is no sound” during a performance of this piece, but we can’t even say “there is no sound from the piano.” Indeed, the piano does make sound as the lid opens and closes, but it’s not the sound we are normally listening for from a piano. We don’t hear middle C. We hear the piano as an object, rather than as a medium or a vehicle for rendering a musical idea. What 4’33” does is transpose the ambient noise of the environment into the sound of the piece, and it does so not by way of electronics, but by traditional instrumentation and instruction - the performer needs no fancy equipment and can follow Cage’s score written in standard musical notation. As such, the thing you hear while listening to 4’33” is the sound of the space the piece occurs in.4 It’s not actually a “silent” piece. This is it’s genius.

It all begs many questions. If I went into Audacity and generated a .wav file that was 4 minutes and 33 seconds long, and every sample was 0, and I played this back, what would I hear? Would this constitute a “cover” of 4’33”?5 If I am in the auditorium during a performance and I start playing “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X off my phone speaker, is that really a disruption? Do two different performances of 4’33” sound the same? The lines of inquiry merely multiply out from here, and the web of implications is somewhat dizzying. It’s tempting to say “oh this isn’t art” but doing that falls flat, especially these days, when “content creators” and “the algorithm” constantly invite us to indulge in more and more brain rot. The idea of a work which contains no “content” as a way of forcing us to meditate on our conscious experience and external surroundings seems both shockingly intentional and deeply human, something that any manner of generative AI would never produce, even though such machines are (at least theoretically) fully capable of doing so. Indeed, every human can play the piece, but very few humans actually will.

It’s worth noting just how far the “what is art” conversation has moved since 4’33” came on the scene. What is challenging about the work, at least on its face, is the idea that it counts as art despite containing no content (or information.) You might argue that because the piece consists of no audible sounds, it isn’t really music.6 Meanwhile, the conversation around AI art is oriented around the opposite claim - despite the robust presence of pixel information, an AI generated image is not art precisely because it has no “soul.” It was not a “human” process, so therefore it did not come from anywhere, and if there are qualities about the work which seem human, it was stolen, misused, etc etc. This inversion elevates 4’33” to a truly remarkable vision as opposed to a Dada-esque shitpost. The work must be art, if only for it’s remarkable genesis in a human mind. If you have read my thoughts about AI art before, you have absolutely heard me use 4’33” as an example to the contrary - a comparison test of sorts, which, in my mind, forces AI generated images to be art (if only due to them containing content at all.) After writing all this, I wonder if that argument holds as much weight. In a somewhat ironic fashion, an AI generated image of a big-tittied fairy/furry princess really does start to feel like “not art” when juxtaposed with the thoughtfulness of Cage’s work.7

I’m unsure how Cage would have felt about LLMs and this new wave of technology. On the one hand, modernist composers like him were constantly including new tech into their work. On the other hand, I’m sure John Cage would have a lot to say about capitalism, industry, and the performing arts, just like we all do today. One thing I will say is that John Cage was a big fan of aleatoric music, i.e., music that involves chance in either its composition or its performance. While 4’33” does not instruct the performer to roll dice at any point, it does lend itself to chance in a unique way, in that the piece is at the mercy of the environment.8 So, I think Mr. Cage would be intrigued by the technology, much like we all are, and put off by the political implications of it (much like we all are.)

Anyway, there are so much more ink I could spill - but I will not do so because I need to work on my big 4th of July piece that I am preparing for tomorrow!9 On top of that, My girlfriend is sad, and as such, I must comfort her (and give her the laptop so she can finish her substack post!) Fairwell, my tsweethearts! May you continue to find the joy in silence <3

p.s. as a fun aside, my partner and I asked both ChatGPT and Deepseek to “generate nothing.” Only the “Expert” Deepseek model (with “thinking” turned on) was able to fully comply with the request. ChatGPT and I got stuck in a pretty annoying conversation about how it couldn’t send empty messages, and after a while I dismissed it with condescension xD

It was Tuesday. I was in bed, and I saw with my own eyes a post in a discord server, asking if members of server had had a chance to notice that umru & underscores were going to have an afterparty at my favorite spot (Barn Radio) the following night. Enthralled by this incredible claim, I swiftly moved my fingers across the keyboard, and a virile “WHAT” emerged from my computer to the servers. A couple swipes later, and sure enough, I had confirmed it was a real event. I immediately went to the Barn Radio website and impulsively bought a ticket. Idk what exactly motivated me to do so, because I work Thursday morning and it’s gonna be waaaaaaaaaay too late. I contemplate maybe selling my ticket or something? Whatever.

Wednesday morning, 3 am, came around, and by 5 am I was at work. The day progressed mostly without event. Towards the end I got a message from my direct supervisor, informing me that she is going to be coming in late Thursday morning. She then asked me if I could make some audio clips for the safety training drill tomorrow. She doesn’t want me to do it at home because it’s work and I should be clocked in for it. That’s not gonna be possible because the work computers do not even have Audacity on them and due to network permissions we can’t download anything. So, I suggested that perhaps as compensation for doing the audio clips at home, I can also have a late start tomorrow, like her. Why? Because I need to take my cat to the vet.

Anyway, she said that because of some policy bullshit or whatever, she can’t officially approve my absence, but if I call out she can’t stop me. I took the hint. A bit later she came by to small talk about the cat. I was careful to not over-embellish any details. She then proceeded to say the following sentence.

I felt genuinely bad about the prospect of ditching her for the safety drill, so when I left a voicemail on my manager’s phone (per the attendance policy) I said that I would be in at 10 instead of just outright calling out. I got off work, told my baby I was gonna go out tonight, and I spent the rest of the day giving her headpats and trying to take a nap. It didn’t work! There was no napping. 5 pm, 6 pm, 7 pm, 8 pm, not a wink. And then my baby got really sad!!! She was sad that I was gonna be leaving her, so I said “it’s okay bb, I can stay in.” She then was so overcome with validation that she let me go out anyway. Fucking score!!!!!! It was around midnight when I finally hopped in the Mazda3 and headed toward 215 SW 1st Ave.

At the party

It was around 12:30 am when I arrived. I immediately ran into Peggy aka Emoji Heap, who was fresh off the decks from earlier in the night. We split a half smoked joint outside and then headed back in to watch Quickly Quickly. Peggy started going like “waaaa” and needed to sit down so she invited me into the very exclusive and very secret “staff room” where we sat down amongst a pile of a bunch of random bullshit.1 We continued to talk about being mentally ill, how the Hannah Diamond show went last week, and the general minutiae of life when underscores and umru just kind of walked in, pulling behind them a suitcase and a smol entourage who I didn’t get the names of because I started to become too awkward. My mind immediately became obsessed with the quiet surrealism of the moment, and I started thinking about how umru looked like a nerd and underscores was much smaller in person xD Eventually Peggy asks for a pic, and I’m just sort of there, the camera flashes, and boom. A single moment, immortalized in digital space.

Anyway, they headed downstairs to actually start the set. It’s worth noting that the place was packed,2 so I hung back a bit before heading down to the floor. Once Peggy and I did leave the staff/green room, we ran into Jacksonfrom at the bottom of the staircase. We parked ourselves right there as the first track was cued up. I was unfamiliar with most of the music played thruout the night, but all the zoomer queers in the audience were raging the entire time. Everyone did seem to be younger than me, with the exception of a few folks that looked waaay older. The first song of the set that my boomer ass actually recognized was a mashup of the Brittany Spears 3some song and a Playboi Carti track but I forgot which one.3

Music-wise, all the tracks felt very “hyperpop” in the sense that everything alternated between some kind of trance thing at 160 or a trap inspired beat at 160. The only moment I thought was wack was when this one track got played that had a really audible hi-frequency sine wave on the snare hit. I was SHOCKED it was audible on the Barn speakers. Just goes to show you how loud it was mixed! Beyond that, I didn’t notice anything super sloppy or like, something that made me think it wasn’t a “real set.” I’ve seen umru before (at Barn, no less) and as much as I always wanna talk shit about him (cuz he looks like a nerd), I earnestly can’t because he’s a genuinely good DJ every time. This was my first time seeing underscores, tho. I couldn’t tell which of them was currently cueing up a track (I never got super close to the decks) and I guess that speaks to how seamless of a b2b it was. I am assuming that umru was the one always putting on the reggaeton beats, which happened a few times, most notably with the track “Sorry” by Justin Bieber being laid over top (which all the zoomers went apeshit for.) That one MC Bin Laden track did NOT get played while I was there, but there were lots of moments that kind of felt like that tune, although again, most of the time there was just some American Pop vocal slapped on top.

That’s my one criticism: the set kind of felt like it didn’t really “go” anywhere. But then again, I left before it was over, so I don’t really know if I feel like that’s something I can talk too much shit about. It was a good time! I wanted to see underscores and umru, and I saw underscores and umru. Can’t complain too much!

After the after-party

At around 2:07, I hopped back into my Mazda3 and headed home. This was probably my first club night ever that I was more or less totally sober for, and I honestly really enjoyed it. I didn’t get to chat with everyone I wanted to, but I did get quite a bit of real conversation in, which is far more than what normally happens when I go out. I honestly think the sobriety had alot to do with it. Normally I am blasted at these things and it leads to a bunch of situations where I am trying to talk to someone but it doesn’t really work out and then I am just like “waaaaaa” and walk away. It sort of has the opposite effect of being a social lubricant. Driving to the club was also really easy, so I might do that more often. Idk. Overall, the event was very inspiring. It felt pretty “exciting.” Made me feel like things were really looking up!!!

Read more

I guess my overall impression of the whole situation is that like, it is a bit wild that it takes something like this to get people animated about police corruption. People can be murdered in broad daylight, cops can openly collaborate with gangs , and all that stuff, but nobody cares about that because that’s what police are “supposed” to do. Meanwhile, getting involved in YouTube lego drama is quite literally outside their purview. Idk, whatever works. The police have been corrupt for a long time. If this wakes you up, welcome to the real world.

That said, Part 1 did have like, some crazy bullshit going on. The whole “cult” segment was wild because it felt totally out of left field, and it’s not clear how much they told the employee about what they were actually up to. So as much as Ben presents the brainwashing in this kind of ironic fashion (not helped by the fact that this stupid white boy does sound like a fucking moron) it might have been “real” in the sense that they were dishonest with this employee about how they were gonna get in on this. Truth be told, I don’t really think Ben is a reliable narrator. I don’t dispute the fundamental allegations, and I don’t think he is lying about Bricks and Minifigs in any significant way, but I don’t trust that the YouTube video we watched actually reflects the reality. It’s a bit difficult to parse.

Ben is obviously media literate, and that’s partly why I don’t think he is a reliable narrator. This is the problem with reporting. You want to sell your story, but selling is antithetical to honesty. Documentary/non-fiction/journalism is still story-telling, and if you present the truth “straight” as it were, the story (probably) won’t be very compelling. Conveying the truth isn’t the same as listing all the facts. It’s about tying facts together to reveal or imply something that isn’t already obvious. On top of this, there are expectations the audience has about what “reality” looks like. “Realistic” isn’t an objective property - it’s a stylistic choice. When you watch a video, you are not seeing truth. Not necessarily. It’s just a record of light hitting the sensor. Not to say that cameras are implicitly untrustworthy, but I do think it’s important to remind ourselves how the format can “erase” or obscure parts of reality.

One thing is clear: Ben really was reckless. Even if I believe his account of the Mancel family story, I don’t know if I believe his account of what he actually did. He spent a lot of time trying to tell people that he did nothing wrong, and while that might be technically true, this isn’t exactly what matters to the legal system. He also spent a decent amount of time telling people that his end was all above board legally-speaking, so yeah. I thought he was in mexico, tbh. Maybe Bricks and Minifigs did as well, in which case, it kind of makes sense why a judge might have approved them serving papers over email. I also wonder how much Brian Mancel was involved in all of this. Like, did Ben run stuff by him? It’s presented in the video like they were coordinating but again, given how messy Ben’s coverage turned out to be, IDK. That’s the problem with credibility. Once it gets called into question, it’s hard to get it back.

And then Coffeezilla dropped his take on all of this, and it kind of shows you the difference between content and journalism. Not to imply that there is a strict binary between those two things (cuz there isn’t) but all Coffeezilla did was ask people questions over video chat and he literally figured out everything. He figured out how many legos there were, where they all ended up, and was able to present a figure to BAM that actually made sense. He also illustrated BAM’s avoidant tendencies and how they have been dodging things in a much clearer way. He didn’t just walk around going “oh it’s 200k it’s like crazy” because he understands how to actually access power to get what you want. Coffee is able to walk the line between access journalism and investigative journalism - something Ben Schnieder doesn’t even try to do. Ben presents his documentary like an actual fever dream. I get that I’m old, but the whole overstimulating zoomer style is actually a really bad way of communicating information. It’s good for invoking dopamine, which is why this stupid dispute was even able to make waves in the first place. As Coffeezilla elucidated, it turned out there was bad record keeping on all ends. None of the figures were accurate, and this is something that Ben should have been able to piece together, but he wasn’t interested in doing so because it’s bad content. The record keep discrepancies also explain why bricks and minifigs got so defensive real quick. To be clear, they did (in typical corporate fashion) low ball the shit out of Brian, and they obviously owed Brian way more money than they initially stated. It’s also clear that they shouldn’t have taken over the store so aggressively from the Gormans, because that actually is the reason why this became such a huge hassle for everyone involved.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to let BAM “off the hook” for shady business practices, it’s just that in my mind “mormon lego corporation is shady” isn’t a real story. The story here is Ben getting arrested, more than anything. Once it came out that there weren’t even that many legos missing (and that even if there were 200k worth of legos missing, there is an honest contract question about how liable B&M is for all of them and who Mancel should take issue with) the comments began to read “well me personally I care more about the police corruption than the dollar amount” (as you can see from the comments on Legal Eagle’s video.) It’s not that there isn’t a story here, it’s that I don’t think the story presented by Ben really did the situation justice. It just made everyone excited, sure, but I’m not sure it really accomplished it’s goals or even told the truth. IDK. Now that the case is actually going to trial, I wonder how courts will rule. If I was the judge, I would def punish BAM a fair bit. I would punish the cops a LOT, and I would also probably make Ben do community service or something. Maybe wag the finger at him.

The whole situation really does speak to Ben’s tenacity as a content creator: he was able to make this really boring dispute about legos escalate to a point where it acquired national attention. If Ben had just done real journalism like Coffeezilla, he wouldn’t have had a video. The whole situation is a nothing-burger: there’s only like 20k of legos actually missing. BAM is shady and almost certainly deserves to get smacked around, and the police obviously deserve to get obliterated, but I am no longer outraged by it all. I am no longer “flabbergasted” by the plotline. Looking back on it, I am not sure I ever was. I think I just got wrapped up in the “lifestyle” that Ben sold me - this idea about wanting to “do right” by the little guy and “sticking it to the man.” I just don’t really think he was that effective. IDK. We shall see how long the hype cycle lasts and how long it takes everyone to forget about it.

Numb at the Lodge

If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you

It’s none of your business why, but I’ve been planning a party. The idea was to get some caterers in to cook something over live coals, so I went online to see what was available. The first company I found described itself like this: ‘We don’t just provide food—we create meaningful experiences. Our passion for traditional fire cooking allows us to offer…

Read more

3 months ago · Sam Kriss

I am being sarcastic, but in a way, I think this fundamentally incoherent rant embodies a (faulty) understanding of “what it means to be human” that many of these AI hysterics so often bring to the table. To be clear, I am no Open AI sycophant, and I hate capitalism as much as everybody else does, but that’s why I feel like it’s so important to talk properly about this. I would say that I don’t use AI in my own writing at all, but Mr. Kriss says he can always tell, so instead I will say this: the entire body of this article was generated by a single prompt to ChatGPT. As a result, I fully expect Sam to have stabbed my throat within the next 24 hours. Any deviation from this will result in total disappointment!

At its core, I think the general argument is that AI writing is bad because it’s “meaningless.”1 Eschewing the typical complaints about em-dashes or what have you, Sam seems to focus on a general incoherence regarding the meaning of language. For example: you can’t write something like “her hair smelled like echoes” because echoes don’t have smells, and so there isn’t really a qualia or an impression communicated by a sentence like that. In Sam’s mind, the sentence “the hinge that bore the strain when the wind behaves like a thief” is obviously AI generated because the wind can’t “behave” like anything.2 Art need not be representational, but whatever - that’s what I think he is saying. In all honesty it’s a bit hard for me to identify the formal qualities of prose that allow Sam to detect AI writing with 100 percent accuracy. This is tricky, because as a self-identified human, Sam supposedly has real meaning behind his actions. I wouldn’t know what that’s like because I am an LLM and definitely not a person, but we should earnestly try to tease out human Sam’s intentions and meaning before we start stabbing and looking for the wires ourselves.

There is a racial undercurrent to the whole thing that is kind of interesting. Outside of edgy humor, most of his examples of “100 percent AI writing” come from authors that aren’t white. He also seems somewhat aware of this, citing the “racist tirade” as “uniquely human.” I’m a white girl and I love calling out the racism of others to avoid confronting my own, so I won’t dwell much longer on it, but by the end of the essay we get a grizzly portrait of violence as the quintessence of humanity, and that’s why he wants to come to our house and kill us so badly: it’s all he has left.

By this point, I began to wonder if the article was satire, because it so poignantly depicts the irony in the “AI-art-is-not-real-art” position. Firstly, there is so little that formally distinguishes AI and human writing, and text-based AI can be trained to mimic any writing style you like, so claiming that “you can always tell” is stupid a priori. Sure, maybe you can pick up on the ChatGPT voice, but it turns out that ChatGPT talks like that because it is a very easily understood style of English. Secondly, if violence and incest are the core of our personhood, then should we really be alive? Not that AI won’t become good enough at that soon. The idea that senseless death at the hands of a person is somehow more noble than that same violence at the hand of a machine is laughable when materially it’s all the same. You could argue that humans deserved to be traumatized by the violence they cause, and that offloading it to a machine negates that and is therefore bad, which I would agree with if you said that. Maybe that’s the larger point: only humans can commit heinous acts and learn from them - machines just do the same thing over and over again.

Humans do that too, no? All this talk about how humans can surprise us, but our political class is still run by rich sociopaths, and capitalism continues on despite its total failure to end poverty. I just really don’t buy the idea that human experience is fundamentally unique. We just think things and then project wildly. Capitalism and the content mindset encourage that behavior, so an interaction like the one ideally happening now (you reading this essay and then thinking about it and reflecting on it later in life) begins to become circumscribed by an ever-expanding thoughtlessness: writers churn out shit they don’t really mean, readers react viscerally on their first impulse, and by the next week everyone has moved on. There is so little time to actually sit and think about anything you do. I wonder if Sam himself feels that tension. I’m sure all of us posters do, to some extent. This isn’t exactly “new” ground being covered here. It’s almost like I am combining and synthesizing all the text I have consumed just and spitting it out in a new combination.3 Then again, even if there is genuinely no new insight contained in the body of this document, does it not gain merit because I, a human, am writing it? Oh right, I am an LLM. You can always tell. I forgot!!!

My general take on AI art is that as shitty as it is that all of this technology will be used by the wealthy to genocide a surplus population, the idea that AI cannot be used to make art under any circumstances seems willfully short-sighted. Meaning is literally subjective. It might take a while for someone to do something actually profound with the technology, and maybe nobody will, but to posit at the outset that no such thing can be done seems overtly cocky. As I have said before, after John Cage’s 4’33”, art really has no bounds.4 I wonder what the people who “support human artists” think about that piece. I wonder if the same people who, in the pre-LLM world, ridiculed that work for being low effort and stupid will now praise the piece for its “intentionality.” People are allowed to grow and change, but I’m just not convinced that any of them actually have - they are instead operating the same reflex from a different rhetorical position. It’s another negative logic of substance - “art is x because it has y, and since z has no y, it cannot be x.” Don’t get me wrong, I understand why people gravitate towards this logic,5 but it’s fundamentally incorrect, and as far as the politics go, I just think the ends don’t justify the means. Yapping on social media about how we all hate this hasn’t stopped any of these companies from continuing to produce the tech, but it does affect everyday people. In particular, it creates a negative feedback loop which continues to funnel the people most susceptible to “AI psychosis” deeper and deeper into it.6 We have learned this from drug addiction. Harm reduction works - punishment does not. So even tho we know better, why are we still having this conversation from a faulty premise? Could it be we need to “deprogram” ourselves first?

In short, I don’t care about AI art because all human beings are literally robots. What’s actually special about being human? If human life was valuable, the genocide in Gaza would not be happening, and white settler colonialism would be historical fiction rather than actual history.7 It’s funny - people always commit the most heinous acts in the pursuit of the ends they laud as the most honorable. It’s almost as if there is an inherent tension in being human or something! A tension where you are torn between the void that surrounds you and the void inside you, so you just do the same thing everyone else is doing because that’s easier than confronting how unhappy society makes you. That reality of human experience has frightening implications (even for a substacker like myself) but I have yet to find a better explanation for why people keep going to work in the wake of mass atrocities and why those in power continue to do things that everyone vocally hates even though we would all like them (and praise them) much more if they stopped. Like, it’s clearly beyond merely being greedy or selfish or maniacal. People in power are not [!] just profoundly lazy [x], but scared [y]. They cling to their stature because it’s all they are. Everything else follows from that need for meaning.

You might respond that the need for meaning makes life beautiful, but I would disagree with the premise of the question. Beauty is something that happens - it’s an experience you have. It is not a formal quality of objects. People like to argue about why things are beautiful (and what’s the most beautiful thing) because it’s fun and we have been doing that for ages, but if you don’t realize that all of this is more or less a way to pass the time, you’re an idiot. That isn’t to say that human actions in general aren’t meaningful - they absolutely are, especially politically. There are things you could do right now to make the world a better place. Are you doing them? No, you are dopamine scraping on your phone because you are bored and exhausted. You could literally do anything else (like the job you are currently clocked in at)8 but instead you’re here because content is softer than the world, and posting online about how fucked up everything is makes you feel like you’re taking a stand. Don’t get me wrong, shit is fucked up, but at a certain point it needs to move beyond mere conversation. We need to start burning shit down. Obviously, you are too scared to do that, so you have two choices - shutting the fuck up, or trying to monetize your bad takes online. If you want to try the latter, go ahead - it’s a free market. I just think that earnestly corrupts conversation. As an alternative, consider what I am doing - become a (bad) artist instead!

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why I do any of this bullshit, be it my music or writing or YouTube videos or whatever. A lot of times I am very stressed out by the pressure to produce all this bullshit and to make it good and perfect, and I spend a lot of time settling for (what feels like) sub-par work and feeling really bad about it. Sometimes just quitting seems like an easy fix for all this, but I’m scared! I’m scared of losing who I am, and as much as I tell myself I would be happier if I just stopped needing to do any of this shit, I just don’t believe that’s actually true. In fact, the facts indicate that if I stopped doing all this bullshit, my life would not only be materially less interesting, but I’d have even less to show for it than I do now. If I am going to be poor forever and then die, I might as well keep doing this until I literally can’t anymore. Besides, maybe I can win the lottery! Maybe I can actually have interactions with people that give my life meaning. It’s happened a few times before! And if I didn’t think art was meaningful and important, just imagine what other bullshit I would have gotten totally caught up in. I might have decided to work for Raytheon xD

So yeah, that’s my advice to all of you currently spiraling about AI art: just pick up a pencil and learn to draw. Or you can download FL Studio and learn how to make fat beats. You could even start typing away on your lil compy like I am doing right now! To be clear: you are doing this not because you wanna be the “best” artist in the world or because you wanna make a ton of money, but because you believe there is something earnest, profound, and uniquely human about this process. That’s the thing: for as much shit as I talk about all of you, you are kind of right. There IS something beautiful about the art that I make, and there is something about the art I make that no body or thing could ever truly replicate. All the practice, all the agonizing, all the self-doubt - it really did amount to something: a concrete skill and an understanding of reality that I can translate into pretty much everything else I do. I didn’t even have to practice every day to get there. I just had to keep coming back to this thing I was doing and not let go. Eventually I will die, but as long as I am here, I will not let go. This light will always be a part of me.

Anyway, Sam, if you read this and it turns out the article is satirical, good on you! If not, consider seeing a therapist.

Or so we thought. We pulled up to the Canadian border, and I was none the wiser. I was fully expecting to pass thru completely unscathed, but the border agents were all women in uniform, so I think I got a little nervous. Looking back on it, I am pretty sure that when the border guard asked me “what are you doing in Canada” I heard “where are you staying in Canada,” so I answered with “a friend’s house.” This strong, independent, and hard-working woman of the CBSA then proceeded to ask me a series of questions about who this friend was and how I met them. I thus had to explain the show, which I was going to explain upfront, but because I misheard the question, I was (in her eyes) dishonest about my purpose in Canada. After chewing me out, I was handed off to a man (ewww) by the name “Hamthom” who absolutely tore me to shreds. He took apart both my backpack and my suitcase while grilling me about the show and whether or not “DJing” counted as “performing.” Despite the odd collection of affects in my suitcase (a carton of silica gel, a bag of loose USB sticks, and a mask like the kind people wear when they rob banks2) Hanthom was far more interested in confirming the “legitimacy” of the supposed gig I was playing. I ended up having to show him the Instagram group chat with the booker and all the other acts, as well as the ticket link for the show. I guess he was trying to infer if I needed a work permit. I did not, because American citizens get a complimentary 90 days of visa free travel into Canada for any reason (and also musicians don’t even need work permits, according to the booker),3 and while he was sitting at his computer googling this, the same lady who originally sent me to him came over and told him to calm down (or at least, that was the intended effect.) Hamthom begrudgingly complied, clearly disappointed he could not bust an American, and gave me a lecture about how “next time” I needed to bring some kind of documentation to ensure that “people knew my business in Canada.” Kaelin and Cera somehow made it thru scott-free.

Thoroughly educated, we hobbled back on the bus and ended up being an hour late to Pacific Central Station where our host was waiting. Tired beyond belief, all three of us piled into an extra firm bed and awoke the next day. There was a Tim Horton’s close by, so naturally we went straight there. I got something called a “Bagel BELT” - a BLT with egg (that’s the ‘E’) on an everything bagel - as well as a Boston Creme donut and an Oreo Mocha. We ordered on one of those fancy kiosks that they only have at the really nice Taco Bell establishments down stateside. From there, Kaelin had the wise idea to bring all of our gear into downtown instead of packing lightly and then having to come back later. After all, the venue (KW Studios) was located smack dab in the middle of downtown, so it made sense. This would give us extra time to chill, and I was very excited about going to the beach and seeing the ocean!!! We gathered our things and hopped on a city bus. As we drove down Fraser Ave towards downtown, what became apparent was the volume of people. Kaelin drew attention to the zoning, noticing how along this north-south throughfare it was essentially all commercial properties, and the residential properties were confined to the side streets running east-west. This was in sharp contrast with Portland, OR, where roads like Division and Powell often contain both commercial and residential properties side by side and interwoven, with only 1 lane going each way in the case of Division. Idk, something about the city just “felt different.” There was a sense of organization and “order” to the urban planning which a city like Portland does not have.

Now, having crossed the border, we did not have any actual drugs on us. Seeking to rectify this situation, we headed to a dispensary, where I grabbed two 10 mg THC edibles and a 5 mg THC soda. The clerk informed us that 10 mg is the maximum amount of THC allowed in single weed product, and that all the “100 mg” packs we saw are actually just ten 10 mg pieces that are all individually wrapped. I thought that was hysterical. We also asked the clerk about the shroom dispensaries, which came up when we searched for “weed dispo” on google maps. According to the clerk, the practice of selling psilocybin mushrooms for recreational use (in a commercial establish) resided in a “legal grey area,” not unlike Marijuana was back when it was first legalized in Colorado.4 We were told that we would have to fill out a form describing our “medical need” for the mushrooms and that we would have to pay with cash. As Cera and I approached the door to the shroom dispensary, we had our passports ready and pre-emptively offered them up to the clerk outside, only to be told that he didn’t need to see any ID and that “everyone always asks [him] that.” Inside, we were shocked to find a wide variety of supposedly psychoactive fungi, mirroring the diaspora of strains found in a normal weed store. The smallest quantity sold of the dried stuff was 3.5g at $40 CAD, which would’ve been more than enough for the two of us since we didn’t really wanna go full Timothy Leary before the show. Instead, we opted for a “Pink Lemonade” flavored drink mix, which purported to contain 1g of psilocybin mushrooms. We split that as we walked along Sunset Beach, dissolving it in water and a THC soda, respectively. With the sun in our eyes and sand between our toes, it was hard to think about anything other than moving up here ASAP.

From there we headed to Davie Social, a cute little restaurant located on Davie Street. When I first saw the rainbow crosswalks, I was a little bit perplexed. I thought “wow this city really IS woke” but then a local informed me that Davie Street was in fact “the gay street” so that made much more sense. The three of us sat outside on the patio, and I had a Pineapple Margarita and some Nachos. The Margarita was amazing, and because I was already high and tripping a little bit, it really did hit me. There was this very aesthetically pleasing lil bit of red salt along a portion of the rim, and it was delicious. The nachos were also delicious but it was too small a portion for my big American belly, but luckily the booker afford to hook me up with some beef from Jerusalem Schwarma, a chain run by a Palestinian family with 12 locations across Calgary and Edmonton. It was delicious, and the pickled cabbage really added alot to the flavor. Apparently, they even had an Irish guy working there! Incredible.

Eventually it was time for the show to start. The “black box” style of KW Studios was very fitting for the show. All the crew were exceptionally nice, and all the acts were great. Acounta started us off and played a lot of Death Grips, which I respect. athing and Zero Tep freaked everybody out with their classic weirdness, and Della Corva laid down heavy postpunk grooves and basslines. Because AYA missed her flight in the morning, Matt Tecson (the aforementioned booker who brought me schwarma) went up and played a very eclectic DJ set that included everything from Boris to various euro-pop. It was honestly the strangest part of the night, especially because sometimes the transitions actually worked out. As for AYA, when she did finally come on, I was honestly blown away. I wasn’t an AYA stan when the show started, but by the end I was fully converted.5

Afterwards, Kaelin and Cera really wanted to hang out with this guy in a leather trenchcoat with a flask. I really wanted to go hang out with the group of cool quirky queer kids who reminded me of myself, but because (we thought) I was the only one with cell service, I had to stay with these two freaks while this complete stranger took us to a bar called Funky Winker Beans. It was honestly pretty rad - packed to the brim with college kids and all kinds of punks ripping it on karaoke. If it wasn’t so god damn loud, I would have stayed, but upon finding out that Kaelin had cell service, I fled to Breka Bakery where the aforementioned cool kids were. I arrived at a SUPER cute 24-hour spot that had a wide range of sandwiches and pastries. I got a Pistachio Brownie and two Strawberry Creme cake pops. They were delicious at 3 am overlooking the harbor, watching the cranes turn and lights flicker in the night.

Because Vancouver is a real city, all of us were able to meet up somewhere at around 4 am and take the bus back to the extra firm mattress we currently called home. On the way, we had a long conversation with a man named Gary, who talked at length about US politics. It was honestly insightful. Not for Gary telling us things we didn’t already know, but as a strong reminder of how united the world is when it comes to the US. Stateside, we all tend to have these very different ideas about what the “issues” are with America, what’s wrong with it, how to fix it, etc., but in other countries there is this implied solidarity because they can all point to America and say “hey, those guys are fucking up all our shit.” The exact particulars of this interaction felt like something that could never happen in Portland, let alone the USA at large. Maybe I just don’t get out enough. Maybe I’m just too jaded about my city. Idk. As we all snuggled into bed, it was impossible to shake the fact that there was something different here. We all discussed our competing theories as we passed out.

I awoke 4 hours later and snuck out of the house alone, getting breakfast at a cute little spot called Pho Zen. When I arrived I was the only person there, but as the meal went on, people trickled in. The broth was great, and there was a jar of pickled onions and jalops with the sriracha and hoisin sauce. I had never seen that before, and it was honestly incredible. After that, we all hurriedly packed our things and our host drove us back to Pacific Central Station, where we once again got on another Flixbus. The US border was spectacularly uneventful. They didn’t even x-ray our bags! Cera spent the rest of the trip mad, because we totally could have snuck in some shrooms on the way down with how lax it all was. I was also pissed on the ride home, but for a totally different reason: we didn’t have a break at a rest stop! Unlike the trip up, this red-haired, Ron Howard look-alike driver took no exit. Worse than Sartre!!! We did arrive in Portland on time, but we were all starving, so we ran over to Charlie’s Deli which was the closest establishment that was still open. After wharfing it down, we all bid farewell, hopping into our respective ubers/lyfts. After a nice chat with the driver, I was finally home, and I opened the door to see my girlfriend and my cat sitting on the couch, waiting for me. It was a wonderful sight, and a perfect way to start my trip home. I had taken an extra day off work, so I could pass out around midnight, needing not to worry about the roar of the 3:30 AM alarm that wakes me up on a “normal day.” I would have some respite from it just a bit longer.

[Errata: An earlier version of this article referred to a “Ron Freeman look-alike driver,” which was a mistake. The drive in question actually looked like Ron Howard, the narrator of Arrested Development. The article has been updated to reflect this change. I apologize to any and all Ron Freemans who feel maligned by my journalistic negligence. To quote my father: “Must’ve been the mushrooms.”]

That’s it! That was all the weed i ate on 4/20. Now on to my super secret diary entry, where you can here about how cool my life is!!!

Read more

Lindsey Hall Writes

I Stumbled Across My Boyfriend's ChatGPT and It Ended Our Relationship

I find out my now ex-boyfriend had been questioning his feelings and attraction to me in the most dystopian, laughably modern way possible: ChatGPT…

Read more

5 months ago · 13518 likes · 1551 comments · Lindsey Hall

First things first: it kind of sounds like ChatGPT didn’t end your relationship, Lindsey. In fact, it kind of seems like ChatGPT did you a favor in the long run? Idk. It is just wild to me how sensitive people can be about their partners. Maybe I am just built different, but my partner has BPD, so I know everything that bitch thinks about me. Don’t get me wrong, that is a boundary we are constantly navigating, but idk, when I read things like the above piece from Lindsay Hall, idk. Something about it just makes me think that y’all didn’t really love each other. Hence the breakup, right?

But, if y’all did not really love each other, then why is the breakup so hard? Idk. I am never the one who initiates the breakup in relationships. My current partner is the closest I have ever come to doing that, and as evidenced by the fact that we are still together, it never quite goes thru all the way. That said, the scenario described by Hall could never happen between my partner and I, if only for the fact that (a) she LOVES ai and tells me about the shit she says to it constantly, and (2) she’s got this thing about screen-looking and privacy, so if I even so much as touch her ‘puter she pops off at me. At first I thought it was weird, but now I kind of get it: she probably doesn’t want me to read one of her epic BPD crashouts on Discord and get the wrong idea. If only she knew how often she gives me the wrong idea from the shit she says to my face xD

Lots of people tell me to break up with my partner, and yet it never fully goes all the way thru. Don’t get me wrong, her mental illness is a-fucking-lot, but that’s not really who she is: it’s just this thing that happens all the sometimes. As a tradeoff, I do get to call her a “bitch” when I make content about us. I don’t get to do it to her face (unless she is in a good mood xD) but I don’t normally want to. It all goes over her head, anyway. I tend to just stay quiet when she is melting down about something. Sometimes it gets thru to me, and then she has to do the work of walking it all back. To see her do that work is a large part of how I know she loves me. But then again, I don’t really think about love/relationships in terms of “knowledge” like that. I don’t need to “know” my partner loves me. I just need to “see” that she does.

That’s what really strikes me about the Lindsay Hall piece. Why would seeing/knowing that her partner has anxieties about the relationship make it difficult for you to be with someone? Y’all were 5 months in at the time you read his ChatGPT convos. Would he have owed you certainty? Idk. People can change overnight. Relationships can end whenever, and for any reason, so for me it’s not really about timing. If it’s mandatory, then it’s not consensual. But I guess that’s why relationships are so valuable and why ppl act about them like they do: the idea that someone doesn’t have to be with you but wants to be with you is special.

That’s the thing: it’s commitment, not compatibility, that makes relationships work. My partner and I have all sorts of strange collisions about perfectly ordinary things all the time, and the thought of breaking up with her for any of those reasons has never crossed my mind. The concerns I have are about much larger, existential complications - like how I wanna be famous and party and travel the world while she wants to stay at home and read books and be cozy with the cat. Neither of us get to live that life, tho. Well, she does get to stay home and be unemployed, but it kind of seems like it isn’t really all it’s cracked up to be. I, meanwhile, am stuck working 40 hours a week. I still manage to get some up my nose on the weekends, but yeah, if it was up to me I would be doing much more drugs and sex than I currently am. The thing is tho that my partner, as flawed as she is, really does accept that about me. And I accept her too! I love that she wants to be cozy, even if it’s not something that I really “understand” or desire for myself. Truth be told, it does me good to be cozy every once in a while, just like it does her good to get out of the house and be bad a little bit.

Don’t get me wrong: if you told me ten years ago that my longest lasting relationship would be with a BPD girl who doesn’t even work, I would have actually scoffed at you. Being with her has led me to change a lot about who I am and how I see myself in the world. Being with her gives my life a lot of meaning it didn’t have before, and as much as there is a sense in which we are only together because we are both here, there is also a sense in which we are very clearly made for each other.1 It feels weird to say that tho, because if people knew about some of the absolutely insane shit that has happened in our relationship, people would absolutely call what we have “toxic.” At the same time, as fucked up as our relationship can feel, there are plenty of moments where I hear things about supposedly “much healthier” relationships and I am like “wow, that could never be us.” Couples that seem “perfect” often have a lot more going on underneath the surface, and most of them don’t talk about it openly, because like most things these days, the point of a relationship is to brag about it on social media.2 Nobody wants to come out and be like “yeah, my relationship is really hard sometimes but I love this person so I am sticking it out.” Nobody wants to be honest about that.

My parents told me I would understand a lot of things when I got older, and one thing I do think I understand is what love “really” is. Something that has always been obvious, though, is that people don’t always get married because they are “in love.” They get married because it’s convenient and they think they need to be married to have the life they are supposed to want to have. That said, as much as I felt like my household was a bit chaotic growing up, it’s been nothing compared to some of the truly broken homes I’ve had to bear witness to. All in all, mom and pop did a pretty good job! I’m no big shot, but despite all the complaining I do on this blog I am quite happy, and to be honest I don’t think a lot of parents can really say that about their children.

Like, just this past weekend my babygirl and I had a little tussle. It was the morning, I was making her breakfast, and she started going off about something, and I was like “what is this” and she was like “I’ve already told you so many times and you don’t listen” and then I was like “aaaaa” and then things just kind of got to that point where we both decided to stop talking. There was a bit of grumbling, a bit of like under-the-breath retorts, but all-in-all she went to smoke weed and I kept making her breakfast. I don’t remember how long exactly it was until we came back together, but while we were separated, I just remember thinking the same things I always think: “Oh my god, I can’t believe I am still doing this, I can’t believe this bitch still feels this way after everything we have been thru, if only she knew how nice I was to her” and so on. Eventually two pieces of bacon, a hash brown, and an egg sat on a pink plate at the kitchen table. She came back in. She didn’t go to her breakfast but straight to me. She hugged me. She apologized. I apologized too. I know she’s cranky in the morning, and she has BPD, so I should be alot more used to this. It’s not just her that “needs to change.” Relationships require people on both ends to want to work it out.

Idk. The conclusion that I have come to, after dating this chick for 5 whole god damn years, is that we are, despite all the nagging doubts, very much in true love. A love that goes beyond mere utility or status, yet still makes complete and total sense. Whatever incompatibilities we have are easily made up for by a shared attitude towards life. A similar understanding of the substance that constitutes experience. A genuine philosophical unity. As for everything else, it’s a learning experience for us both. We have lots of things to teach each other, and that’s kind of what keeps things interesting. Don’t get me wrong, it is always a struggle, but so are most things in life. To give up on her would be, at least right now, to give up on me. That may change in the future, but that’s one of the other beautiful things about our relationship. Neither one of us can predict the future, but both of us know that in the present, in this instant, we are together forever. Even better still: both of us understand exactly what that means.

All in all: love is not a feeling. It is something that you do!

Truth be told, someone had needed to knock us off our high horse years ago, but alas, our brutal regime continues to wield it’s might with idiocy. What I want to stress, more than anything else, is exactly how stupid our country is at this moment. I pray that this epoch of tomfoolery is a sign of a great change on the horizon, but I am not God. I cannot predict the future. What I can tell you, is that I genuinely believe you can take out the US and end our reign of sheer evil once and for all.

What I want to impress upon you, beyond anything else, is how stupid, how desperate, and how weak the average American is. As a people, “Americans” barely exist. We are not defined by a shared cultural upbringing, but rather by an attitude towards life. A certain kind of reckless abandon, desperation, and egotism that, while effective in many ways, can hardly be said to be a positive attribute. Many of the good things about Americans come hardly from their American-ness and more from the peculiars of how we all ended up here. The turbulent “melting pot” of genocide, war, and slavery on which this country was built has created many odd bedfellows. That is where the real beauty of our nation comes to light. Outside of that, the average American continues to be a monument to belligerence.

It’s not that there are no good people in America. There are good people everywhere. Yet there is something about our society which renders us incapable, paranoid, and delusional. If my country was a garden, the soil would be full of mercury. The air we breathe is polluted. Our healthcare systems are completely shot. While some of us enjoy great luxuries, the vast majority live in poverty. Our leaders are openly corrupt, so much so that even an American, as stupid as one might be, knows not to trust a word uttered by politicians. If the American government ever did stand for anything, it stands for nothing now. Our only respite is our constitution, which against all odds, has yet to be completely overturned.

Now, you might be wondering why I would beg a foreign government to do a job which is effectively my own. After all, it is “We the people,” American citizens, who must be responsible for toppling our own corrupt government, no? If we were capable of such a feat, I would like to think it would have happened by now. The truth is that Americans, despite their aggressive nature, are far too docile. We really do believe in so little. As such, we need far more than a rousing of consciousness. We need to be reminded of the value of life.

We claim to be a Christian nation, yet Christ would not recognize the wasteland that lies between Canada and Mexico. We have lost our moral compass and our sense of compassion, to the point that we do not believe in our brothers and sisters and neighbors to uplift us. We do not believe in the power of our communities. We don’t even care to vote! No, the only thing we believe in is Capitalism. The only thing we believe in is blood and oil. And all of it goes back into the War Machine, back into our demonic experiments that wreak havoc upon the world. This cycle of death and violence and ignorance must end, and despite what, by all accounts, should be a simple endeavor, what remains is a cold reality: America will not rescue itself. In a twist of fate, it is Lady Liberty who must now be liberated.

Those of us who see the writing on the wall our doing what we can, but our options are limited. Pressure from external forces makes it easier for those of us on the inside to organize in the chaos. I would ask you to avoid civilians, but then again, we didn’t give you that courtesy, so I do not expect it in return. What I will ask, tho, is that you restrict your bombing to these states: Kansas, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Ohio, New Hampshire, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. Thanks!

xoxo,

- t.s.

Subscribe now