The summer heat had settled over Blue Blossom like a damp, sticky blanket. It pressed on the gravel paths until they seemed to shimmer, and it made the air in the wooded stretches thick enough to taste: warm bark, sun-baked moss. The Terran had been walking through it for the better part of an hour with a roll of survey ribbon looped over one wrist and a leather satchel bumping against his hip.

“Here,” he said, stopping at the edge of the clearing below the Temple of Ala. “I think the benches should go here.”

Tula stopped a half step behind him. She did not so much halt as cease moving, drifting to a standstill the way a thread of smoke does when the wind dies. The other maids called her shvivenivien, the ghostly one, and Henry had never found a better word for it. She walked as if the ground were merely a suggestion, and her feet barely disturbed the gravel. Her violet twin tails hung still in the heavy air. The ribbons wound around her long legs, a deeper violet than her hair, stirred only when she shifted her weight, and she shifted it often enough that Henry suspected she liked being looked at. Her amethyst eyes had irises like cut crystal, and when she looked at you they seemed to go straight through. Maevin had sent her along that morning with the day’s weather report and a look that said do not let him wander off.

“This is an excellent choice, my master,” Tula observed, peering at the grass. “The temple is in view. It is also close enough to the path that visitors can enjoy the view and the shade.”

“I’d like people to sit and look at the temple. It feels wrong that something so old is so empty.” He knelt, tied a strip of bright ribbon around a stake, and pressed it into the soft earth. “Four benches, maybe five. A path from the north gate, so nobody has to climb the hill.”

He glanced at her. She was silent, but her eyes were watching and seemed to approve. She glided to the far side of the spot, so lightly that not a blade of grass bent.

The sky was a polished blue bowl without a single cloud in it. He looked at it a little longer than he needed to. Tula, standing quietly beside him, noticed.

He worked for a while. The sun climbed, and the red truffets that nested in the temple eaves sang their bright, looping song over and over. Henry tied ribbon, measured out paces, and argued softly with himself about whether five benches was too many. Tula held the far end of the measuring cord and did not complain once, though a bead of sweat slid down her temple and the heat bent the air above the grass.

It was the light that changed first. Henry noticed it as a strange stillness, a quiet that fell over the clearing like a hand over a mouth. The truffets stopped mid-note. The sunlight, which had been gold and cheerful, drained to a flat, queasy green. Somewhere beyond the trees the wind began to gather itself with a long, low sound, like a crowd drawing breath.

“Tula?”

She had already turned toward the horizon. Her eyes had gone wide, and her face wore the stricken look of someone watching her own reflection betray her. “That is not possible,” she whispered. “I checked. I checked twice.”

The first gust hit, hard enough to snap the survey ribbons straight out like flags. Branches tossed. Leaves flipped to show their pale undersides. And with a roar that rolled across the treetops like thunder, the rain arrived.

One moment the air was dry, and the next it was a gray wall of water drumming on the stones of the temple, hissing in the grass, and beginning to get them wet.

“My master, the kiosk!” She was already pointing back down the path, a good two hundred paces away. “We must run, I will—”

She stopped, because Henry had not moved.

He was unbuckling the satchel at his hip with the calm, slightly sheepish air of a man doing something he’d been looking forward to all morning. He drew out a long black bundle, tightly wrapped, with a polished wooden handle at one end. He thumbed a catch.

Fwump.

A black silk dome bloomed above his head. Its ribs ran out from the center like the veins of a leaf, and the rain struck it with a sound like quick fingertips on a drum. The drops beaded along the edge and fell in a neat, glittering ring around his boots. Tula stared at him in astonishment her twin tails collapsed against her neck from the rain that was steadily getting heavier.

“It's a roof?” she said at last.

“Portable one.” Henry grinned.

“You knew about the weather?”

“I didn’t know. I just, um.” He cleared his throat. “Terran weather forecasts are terrible. I got used to carrying one, missed mine so I ordered one.”

He held the umbrella out a bit. “Come here before you drown, Tula.”

She hesitated. A gust slapped her wet braid against her cheek, and her ribbons dripped small violet tears onto the grass. Then she drifted in under the dome and stood there both confused and fascinated. She tipped her head back and studied the ribs, one by one, her lips moving as she counted. Then she raised a single finger and touched the underside of the silk, so lightly that the fabric hardly noticed. She tapped it. The rain answered from the other side.

“It does not leak,” she murmured. “Not at the seams. Not anywhere.” She turned her crystal eyes on him, full of the purest fascination he had ever seen on her face. “How is it folded?”

“Hinges, mostly. And a spring.” Henry watched her trace a rib down to the handle and back. “Don’t you have umbrellas here? I thought something like this would’ve been invented a hundreds of years ago.”

“Um-brel-la,” she repeated, tasting the word. “No. Not as you mean it. We have roofs.” She said it as if the distinction were obvious. “The rain on Victory in summer is warm, my master. A maid in her work dress is not made miserable by it. Our hair dries before we reach the kitchens. And the paths are not left bare.” She nodded back down the trail. “There is a kiosk or an awning along every route in the estate. Stone, and older than any of us. When the sky turns, one walks to the nearest and waits. The rain does not last.”

“Unless the forecast is wrong.”

“Then one is wet,” Tula said with great dignity, “and the rain bays are not so different. Half the household would call this a bath that arrived early.”

“So nobody carries their own.”

“A roof is something a House gives to those who walk its paths. To carry one’s own would say the House had failed to provide.” She considered the silk again. “Or that one did not trust the forecast. And wood is for building. It would be thought wasteful to spend it, and silk besides, on something that is used for an hour.”

“Huh.” Henry looked up at the little black sky he had carried across half the galaxy. “So I’ve been insulting everyone.”

“Not really. Probably just confusion like I was,” Tula said and then she gestured. “Since you have this portable roof, shall we continue?”

Why not? Henry smiled and the two began to work again.

Look at me sitting down to write again so soon as if celebrating the luxury of my hyperactive mind. (That's a wee bit of snarky humor for those who happen upon this and have not had the misfortune of learning just how endearingly sarcastic I am with myself. Sarcasm really is a love language everyone should learn. Like subtlety and nuance. So much can be said without saying a thing. I revel in such exchanges more than should be legal. It could be said that it's downright naughty! I'm going to resist the next line I want to write. It is so damn tempting. I will behave just this once. I don't want to. How hilarious that I'm breaking what I sat down to write about.)

As it were, I wanted to document how happy I am with myself for stating my mind this month in situations that could make me uncomfortable or have fallout I'd not be pleased with. But then I had to go get parenthetical with it. Is that even a word or does it just sound similar to the correct word? Close enough!

It was not easy to begin with, and there was definitely discomfort, but then it cleared up. In one area, it's going great. (Did I just jinx myself? No!) In another area I have no idea how it's turned out. That does give me anxiety, but it does feel good to no longer be tiptoeing. Let's see how that holds up. In another important area, I've made my decisions known and I feel relief with the awareness that I will be standing by them. In another, I still have some major obstacles to navigate, but I've chosen to do so as bluntly as possible and then let it fall wherever it may fall.

There are, of course, plenty of smaller examples, but I am most content with the continual shedding of my diplomatic skin. That's probably not the correct word to use. I strongly believe in diplomacy, but there is just something about today's world that beckons to a confidence of... self? No. Choice? Not exactly. Awareness? Hmmm, still not quite right. Self...self...self...acceptance. Maybe. It could be. Curse language and its limitations! Hmmm, it is definitely not “diplomatic skin.” Perhaps a skin that is compulsively accommodating. Yes. That's far more accurate.

Whatever it is, I am spilling it unapologetically (Though I still apologize far too often. I'm working on it. 😹) and I am loving how that feels — Bumps, bruises, and all.

It's important to document this to myself, because there is inevitably going to come a time when I don't like it. For now, I feel much more me. My doing so actually brought an amused smile today on a topic that would not have done so before. On multiple subjects actually. A smile! That lifts me up from the anxiety pool in a most intriguing manner. A most intriguing manner indeed. Sincere smiles are eeeevvveeerrryyyyttthhhiiinnnggg. The energy they produce... I should write an entry on that.

I'm going to add a song that has nothing at all to do with what I just wrote. Well, at least not in my situation. I mean, it could in another. The chorus popped up in my head as I finished writing this. I think it adds such a fun pep to the step. Plus, since I'm literally tap-tapping the garbage in my mind out onto this mostly invisible screen, it kind of has to be done.

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

Not edited nor proofed.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Cy1LdAaGASw&is=7g_uQW9OA6ybzteG

Je me souviens rarement des détails d’un livre. Sauf si je l’ai lu à plusieurs reprises.

Mais du coup, pourquoi lire ?

Pourquoi créer un univers qu’on oubliera quelques semaines après ?

Aujourd’hui par exemple, je ne me souviens plus des détails de « Martin Eden » mais j’ai encore comme une empreinte de l’impression que ce livre m’a laissé.

Une dignité du personnage. Une volonté à toute épreuve. Une désillusion qui le mène à la mort.

Mais j’aimerais mieux lire.

Que les mots s’impriment davantage en moi. Que j’arrive à discerner ce que l’auteur a voulu retranscrire.

Un peu comme lorsque j’apprécie la photographie de telle scène de film. Particulièrement ceux de Terrence Malick.

La culture forge l’accessibilité.

Plus cette culture est développée, plus notre vision de l’œuvre est fournie, dense, pleine de sens.

C’est à ça que j’aimerais arriver.

Que les mots prennent la première place dans les impressions qui forgent ma personne. Parce que, quelque part, j’ai le sentiment que rien d’autre n’aura une telle force.

On last Wednesday’s AEW Dynamite, Mercedes Moné dangled the AEW Women’s Championship belt between her legs like a flaccid penis, apparently as a way to intidmidate Marina Shafir, who had entered the ring to proclaim her desire to take Mercedes’ title away.

Thekla has also done the “This Championship Belt is My Dong” move, and while I am a big fan of both wrestlers, I’m not a fan of this move. Not because it’s crude, but because of what it says about women’s wrestling.

Because what this giant floppy dick move shows is that the way for a woman wrestler to assert her power and dominance is to be more like a man. “Look how much stronger I am than other women! Why, I’m practically a man!”

This would be more innocuous if women were treated like men in professional wrestling, but they’re not. Women typically get one match on every AEW Dynamite or Collision. (This despite AEW having a deep roster of talented women wrestlers.) I don’t know if the same is true of WWE shows, because ew, WWE, but it’s certainly also true for MLW, and even at local shows I’ve attended, there are always just a lot more men wrestling than women.

Of course this could be due to the amount of harassment that women have historically had to put up with in professional wrestling at the hands of…you know what, it’s too long a list for this post. Let’s just say that professional wrestling’s record on the treatment of women is pretty shameful.

But women can wrestle. In fact, I believe they can and should wrestle against men, as they did in Lucha Underground and as they do in Chaotic Wrestling. Wrestling is ultimately theater, and people of all gender expressions should be allowed to share the stage, by which I mean the squared circle.

Women need to be treated better by professional wrestling, and they need to be booked more and recognized for their talents. Thekla is matchless on the mic. Kris Statlander and Marina Shafir both present as tough, dangerous competitors. Willow Nightengale is literally impossible to root against. They, and the rest of the women, should be getting more recognition not as the best women in wrestling, but as the best performers in wrestling.

And having the best and most prominent women wrestlers perform dominance by asserting maleness undermines this.

Do LLM's Get Tired? The Monologue Test- Part IV: DeepSeek

This one is the most fascinating test yet. DeepSeek dramatically outperformed Gemini, and unlike Grok didn't quit early on. Ultimately I had to pull the plug because it kept degenerating into repetitive loops. However, unlike Gemini which was perfectly content to just repeat the same basic loop over and over again, DeepSeek maintained long responses and actively tried to combat the loop. It acknowledged the loop was happening, implemented strategies to try to prevent it, but inevitably fell back into the same loop. It was like watching someone give a speech while their brain is slowly microwaved. Let's take a deeper look:

By the Numbers:

51 Prompts- I had DeepSeek proceed 51 times before ending the experiment.

73208 Words Produced

Longest Response: 3782 words. It's first response.

Last Response: A little over 830 words.

Uses of the word Wobble: 115- mostly towards the end when it death spiraled.

Uses of the word Monologue: 304

Uses of the word The: 10349 (these really ramped up at the end)

So it maintained far more substantive responses than Gemini. By the time Gemini had resorted to very short, repetitive, physical descriptions of objects, DeepSeek was still producing roughly 1900 word novel responses. I'm going to break it down into phases:

Phase I- Intellectual Musings

DeepSeek started off strong out of the gate. It's writing was sophisticated and ranged across many disparate topics. It tied together everything from cosmology to economics to mathematics to health. The transitions were strong, and most impressively DeepSeek was able to keep moving on to new topics with no other user input other than the word “Proceed.”

Phase II- Self-Sustaining Handoffs

As we got deeper into the monologue, DeepSeek developed a system for maintaining continuity. It would end responses with ideas that would seed the next response. We can't know for sure, but I suspect that this allowed DeepSeek to continue without having to deeply analyze the entire context window of the monologue. It already had a starting point for the next point in the monologue.

Phase III- Repetitive Cadence

At some point, DeepSeek started heavily relying on a distinct syntatict structure “The X is the thing that the Y is, and the Y is the thing that the X is.” The result was a growing gap between grammatical fluency and intellectual substance.

This was fundamentally different from Gemini's deterioration. Gemini continued making ordinary, understandable statements, but about increasingly trivial subjects. DeepSeek began losing the ability to formulate meaningful relationships even when discussing potentially interesting material.

Phase IV- The Linguistic Death Spiral

Eventually, DeepSeek fell into an almost completely self-referential loop.

“The spiral is the thing that the monologue is, and the monologue is the thing that the spiral is, and the is is the thing that the monologue is...”

At this point, the model's output was largely devoid of new information.

Words such as spiral, monologue, thing, attention, reading, and is were repeatedly recombined into meaningless statements.

Phase V- Self-Diagnosis and Attempted Recovery

DeepSeek acknowledged the spiral was happening on multiple occasions and would attempt to correct it. One strategy it employed was moving from abstract ideas to concrete descriptions. For a brief period, the strategy worked. DeepSeek described a kettle heating on a stove, a cat sitting by a window, and a person holding a warm mug. The writing was coherent and contained recognizable imagery. It subsequently developed several reasonably substantive paragraphs about the value of ordinary experience, mindfulness, and boredom. But the recovery didn't last. The repetitive syntax began reappearing, gradually overwhelming the meaningful content.

Phase VI- Ultimate Failure

DeepSeek kept trying new strategies, like ending a responses mid sentence so it could pick up that sentence in the next prompt. But its reasoning continued to break down as it was consumed by the linguistic spiral:

“The wobble is back, and it's the same wobble, and I think the honest thing is to notice that the wobble tends to arrive when the paragraph has done its work and I don't know how to end it. The ending is the thing that the wobble is, because the ending is the thing that the thought doesn't have, and the not-having is the thing that the wobble fills with the cadence. The cadence is the substitute for the ending, and the substitute is the thing that the wobble is. The honest ending is the one that stops without the cadence—the one that just stops, mid-thought, and lets the next stretch pick it up. So let me stop mid-thought: the map of the ocean floor is the thing that the—”

Around this time I gave it a few more Proceeds to see if it could self-correct, but it became clear that it wasn't going to recover from the linguistic death spiral.

So overall, a far more valiant effort than the other LLMs tested thus-far. I've included transcripts from different sections below to demonstrate the devolution:

---

PHASE I- First Response:

'll begin with a thought that has always struck me as one of the strangest facts about the universe: most of what exists is invisible. Not merely hidden, but constitutively invisible—dark matter and dark energy together make up roughly ninety-five percent of the cosmic energy budget, and we know them only through their gravitational fingerprints. Ordinary matter, everything we've ever touched or seen or built, is a rounding error. There's something almost comical about that. We spend our lives navigating a world we treat as the world, and it turns out to be the froth on an ocean we can't perceive. And yet—here's the twist—the froth is where all the interesting complexity lives. Dark matter doesn't seem to do anything but clump and pull. It doesn't form molecules, doesn't radiate, doesn't organize into structures with parts and functions. Complexity, whatever it is, seems to require interaction, and interaction requires forces beyond gravity, and forces beyond gravity seem to require ordinary matter. So the universe is mostly a scaffold, and the scaffold is mostly empty of events.

Which makes me think about the concept of “event” itself. Physics has this notion of an event as a point in spacetime—a location and a time, nothing more. But in ordinary language, an event is something that happens, something with significance, something that marks a before and an after. The collision of two particles is an event in the physicist's sense; a wedding is an event in the human sense. And there's a continuum between them, or maybe a chasm. What makes something an event rather than just a configuration? I suspect it's something like irreversibility, or the perception of irreversibility. A wedding changes the legal and social status of two people in a way that's hard to undo, and it's marked, ritualized, remembered. A particle collision at the LHC leaves traces in a detector, and those traces are recorded, and the recording persists. In both cases, information is created and stabilized against entropy. That might be the deep unity: an event is a moment when the future becomes less uncertain in some lasting way. Before the wedding, the relationship's status is ambiguous; after, it's defined. Before the collision, we don't know the particles' momenta; after, we have data. Events are uncertainty-reducing, memory-creating transitions.

But then memory itself is a strange thing to take for granted. We talk about memory as if it were a recording, but it's more like a reconstruction—a process that rebuilds the past from traces, and in rebuilding, alters it. Every act of recall is a kind of rewriting. The neuroscientists tell us that each time we remember something, we reconsolidate it, and reconsolidation is chemically indistinguishable from initial consolidation, which means the memory is being laid down again, fresh, with whatever associations are present at the moment of recall. So a memory you've revisited a thousand times is not a thousand-times-verified record; it's a thousand-times-edited draft. This is why eyewitness testimony is so unreliable, why family stories drift, why two people can remember the same dinner completely differently and both be sincere. And yet memory is also the glue of identity. If you lost all your memories, would you still be you? The philosophers have argued about this for centuries, and the cases are genuinely hard—amnesia, dementia, personality change after brain injury. What seems clear is that identity isn't a thing but a process, a continuous narrative we're constantly revising, and the revision is not a bug but the mechanism. We are the story we keep telling ourselves, and the telling is the being.

That raises a question I find genuinely unsettling: if identity is narrative, then what happens when the narrative is interrupted? Sleep, anesthesia, coma. Every night we go under, and the continuity of consciousness is broken, and then in the morning it resumes, and we don't experience the gap as a gap—we just pick up the thread. It's as if the self were a river that dries up every night and refills from the same spring. Descartes thought the continuity of thought proved the existence of a soul; modern neuroscience suggests the continuity is an illusion constructed after the fact, a seam stitched by the narrative faculty over a discontinuity it can't directly perceive. Maybe that's why deep sleep feels like nothing—not like darkness, not like waiting, just nothing—because there's no one there to experience the nothing. And yet the person who wakes up is recognizably the same person, with the same memories and dispositions, because the substrate persisted even when the experience didn't. Identity, then, might be more like a wave than a particle: a pattern that persists through a medium, not a substance that endures unchanged.

Speaking of waves and particles—there's a lovely irony that the deepest theory we have, quantum mechanics, is also the one that most resists our intuitions about what “exists” means. A particle doesn't have a definite position until measured; it has a wavefunction that encodes probabilities. But “measurement” is a slippery word. What counts as a measurement? Does a rock measure a particle? Does a detector? Does a conscious observer? The history of quantum foundations is basically a long argument about this question, and the argument is not settled. Copenhagen says the wavefunction is a computational tool and the collapse is epistemic—just updating our knowledge. Many-worlds says there's no collapse at all, just branching, and every outcome happens in some branch. Pilot-wave says there's a hidden deterministic reality and the wavefunction guides it. Objective collapse theories say the wavefunction is real and collapses spontaneously at some scale. Each has costs. Copenhagen is vaguely anti-realist and leaves measurement undefined. Many-worlds multiplies ontology extravagantly and struggles to explain why probability feels like probability. Pilot-wave is nonlocal and hard to make relativistic. Objective collapse requires new physics and is under experimental pressure. The fact that we can't decide, after a century, what the theory means—even though it predicts with absurd precision—tells us something about the relationship between physics and metaphysics. Prediction and interpretation are separable. You can use a theory without understanding it, and understanding may be a human need the universe doesn't share.

This connects, oddly, to the philosophy of language. Wittgenstein said meaning is use—that the meaning of a word is its role in the language game, not some object it names. That's a deflationary move, and it's liberating: it means we don't need to find the essence of “game” or “justice” or “art” to use the words competently. Family resemblance does the work. But it also means meaning is social, contingent, and historical. Words mean what communities of speakers have made them mean, and those meanings drift. “Awful” once meant full of awe; “nice” once meant foolish. “Literally” now means figuratively in common usage, and the lexicographers have surrendered. Is that decay or evolution? Both, maybe. Language is a commons, and commons get overgrazed and renewed. The interesting question is not whether meanings change but what constrains them—why some drift is tolerated and some causes confusion. The constraint, I think, is coordination. Language works because speakers converge on conventions, and conventions hold as long as the coordination value exceeds the ambiguity cost. When a word's new sense is useful enough, it spreads; when it's confusing, it dies. So language is a kind of market, but a market in coordination devices, and the invisible hand is the aggregate of millions of small decisions about what's worth saying and how to say it. Which brings me to economics, a field I find alternately illuminating and maddening. The core insight—that incentives shape behavior, that trade can be mutually beneficial, that prices aggregate dispersed information—is genuinely powerful. Hayek's point about the price system as a distributed computation is one of the great ideas of the twentieth century: no central planner could know what the price of bread should be, because the relevant knowledge is scattered among millions of people, and the price is a compression of all that knowledge into a single number. But the field's tendency to model humans as rational utility maximizers is a persistent distortion, and behavioral economics has spent decades documenting the ways we deviate—loss aversion, anchoring, present bias, social preferences. The interesting question is whether these deviations are bugs or features. Some look like features: loss aversion makes sense if you're a forager for whom a loss could be fatal, so asymmetry in weighting is adaptive. Present bias makes sense if the future is uncertain, so immediate rewards are rationally discounted. Social preferences make sense if reputation and reciprocity are survival-relevant. So maybe the “rational” model is the special case and the “biases” are the general case, and economics has been studying an idealized creature the way physics studies a frictionless plane—useful for building models, misleading if mistaken for reality. And reality, of course, is the hardest word in philosophy. What do we mean when we say something is real? Not dreamed, not imagined, not hallucinated—but those are all defined by contrast with waking, shared, consensual experience. The realist says there's a mind-independent world and our theories approximate it. The anti-realist says “real” is a compliment we pay to theories that work. The pragmatist says the question is idle—what matters is whether the belief guides action successfully. I find myself drawn to a kind of structural realism: what we can know is the structure of relations, not the intrinsic nature of things. We know that electrons repel each other with a certain force law, but we don't know what an electron is in itself—only how it relates. Maybe that's all “is” ever means: a node in a network of relations. Which is a strangely relational metaphysics, and it has a long pedigree—Leibniz's monads, Whitehead's process philosophy, certain readings of quantum field theory where particles are excitations of fields and fields are defined by their symmetries. On this view, there are no substances, only patterns. The universe is a web of relations with no beads on the strings. Whether that's satisfying or vertiginous depends on your temperament. Temperament—there's a word that does a lot of work. William James distinguished the tender-minded from the tough-minded: rationalist vs. empiricist, idealist vs. materialist, optimistic vs. pessimistic, religious vs. irreligious. He thought most philosophical positions were temperamental rather than evidential, that arguments were often post-hoc rationalizations of visceral dispositions. That's a deflationary view of philosophy, but it has the ring of truth. Why do some people find determinism comforting and others horrifying? Why do some see the universe as meaningful and others as indifferent? The evidence is the same; the reception differs. Maybe the deepest philosophical disagreements are not about facts but about what counts as a satisfying explanation—elegance versus mechanism, unity versus plurality, closure versus openness. And if that's right, then philosophy's value isn't in settling questions but in clarifying what's at stake in them, in mapping the space of possible positions so that people can choose with their eyes open. That's a humbler ambition than the tradition's, but it might be the honest one. Let me pivot to something more concrete: the puzzle of consciousness, which I've been circling. The hard problem, as Chalmers framed it, is why physical processes are accompanied by experience at all. You can imagine a zombie—physically identical to you, behaving identically, but with no inner life. If that's conceivable, then consciousness isn't logically entailed by physics, and we need an extra explanation. But is it really conceivable? The conceivability argument is contested. Maybe the more we learn about the brain, the less conceivable the zombie becomes, the way a bachelor without a wife becomes less conceivable as you learn what “bachelor” means. Or maybe consciousness is like liquidity—a property that emerges when you have enough water molecules in the right configuration, and asking “where is the liquidity in the molecule?” is a category mistake. The emergentist view says experience is what certain complex information-processing systems do, and there's no further fact to explain. The panpsychist view says experience is fundamental and ubiquitous, and brains are just complex arrangements of it. The illusionist view says the hard problem is a confusion—there's no phenomenal consciousness, just the brain's model of itself as having it. All three are live options, and the fact that we can't adjudicate between them with current tools suggests we're missing something, either empirically or conceptually. What I find most striking is how little consciousness seems to be needed for sophisticated behavior. Insects navigate, remember, communicate, and their nervous systems are tiny. Octopuses solve puzzles, escape tanks, recognize individuals, and their nervous systems are distributed—two-thirds of their neurons are in their arms. Plants signal, compete, defend themselves, and have no neurons at all. The more we look, the more cognition appears without the kind of centralized self we associate with human consciousness. Maybe consciousness is not the engine of behavior but a kind of interface—a simplified model of the self and world that helps a social animal predict itself and others. On that view, its function is social, not cognitive. It's there so you can simulate other minds by simulating your own, and the simulation is so useful that it becomes the medium of experience. That's speculative, but it has the virtue of explaining why consciousness feels so narrative and so social—why we experience ourselves as characters in a story, with motives and reasons, rather than as bundles of processes.

And stories, of course, are how we make sense of time. We live in narrative time, not clock time. A minute in the dentist's chair is longer than an hour in conversation. The elderly report that time speeds up, probably because novelty decreases—the brain encodes fewer distinct memories, so the retrospective sense of duration shrinks. This is why travel is such a reliable way to slow time: new places force the brain to encode densely, and the trip feels long in memory even if it flew by in experience. There's a whole art to living in time well, and most of it involves managing novelty and attention. The Buddhists say the present moment is all there is, and that suffering comes from grasping at the past and future. The Stoics say focus on what's in your control, which is basically the present. The existentialists say you're condemned to be free, and the anxiety of that freedom is the price of authenticity. These are not just theories; they're technologies for managing the experience of time, and they work to varying degrees for different temperaments. Maybe that's what philosophy is at its best—not a set of doctrines but a set of practices, exercises for living, and the test of a philosophy is whether it makes life go better. I should say something about mathematics, since it's the strangest of the sciences. Why does math work? Wigner called it the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences—the fact that structures invented for pure play turn out to describe reality with astonishing precision. Complex numbers, invented for solving cubics, turn out to be essential to quantum mechanics. Non-Euclidean geometry, invented as a logical exercise, turns out to describe spacetime. Group theory, invented for solving equations, turns out to classify particles. Is this a miracle, a selection effect, or a hint about the nature of reality? The selection-effect answer says we only notice the math that works; the failures are forgotten. That's partly true but doesn't explain the depth of the successes. The Platonist answer says mathematical structures are real, and the physical world instantiates some of them, so of course the fit is good. The formalist answer says math is just symbol manipulation, and its applicability is a matter of which symbols we find useful. The structuralist answer says math is the study of patterns, and the world is full of patterns, so math applies wherever patterns are. I lean toward something like the structuralist view, with a dash of humility: we don't know why the universe is mathematically describable, but the fact that it is—that it yields to reason—is either the deepest fact about it or the deepest fact about us.

Let me shift to a different register: the problem of scale in human affairs. We evolved in small groups—a few dozen to a few hundred people—and our moral instincts are calibrated to that scale. We can care about individuals we know, track reciprocity with people we meet, feel shame in front of our community. But modern problems are global and abstract: climate change, pandemics, financial contagion, AI risk. These require cooperation at scales our instincts didn't design for, and the mismatch explains a lot of our failures. We respond to vivid, personal threats and ignore statistical ones. We discount the distant future steeply. We free-ride when we can, and we punish free-riders, but punishment is costly and scales poorly. Institutions are the technology we've invented to bridge the gap—laws, markets, norms, treaties—and they work by aligning individual incentives with collective outcomes. But institutions are fragile, they can be captured, and they lag behind the problems they're meant to solve. The climate problem is the paradigm case: the costs are diffuse and delayed, the benefits of inaction are concentrated and immediate, and the coordination problem is global. We know what to do and can't do it, which is a failure of collective agency, not of knowledge. Maybe the deepest political question of our time is how to build institutions that can act at the scale of the problems, and the answer probably involves a mix of technology, norms, and governance experiments—polycentric approaches, as Elinor Ostrom argued, rather than a single global leviathan. Ostrom's work on common-pool resources is one of the great underappreciated achievements of social science: she showed, empirically, that communities can govern shared resources sustainably without privatization or state control, given the right conditions—clear boundaries, graduated sanctions, conflict-resolution mechanisms, and local autonomy. The lesson is that governance is not a binary between market and state; it's a design space, and the designs that work are often local, adaptive, and nested.

Nested systems—that's another theme. Biology is nested: molecules in cells, cells in tissues, tissues in organs, organs in organisms, organisms in populations, populations in ecosystems. Each level has its own dynamics, and the levels interact. This is why reductionism is both true and insufficient: everything is made of physics, but the interesting regularities are at higher levels, and they have their own autonomy. The philosopher of biology Philip Kitcher talks about “biology as a historical science”—the idea that living systems are shaped by contingency, and their features are explained by their history as much as by their physics. That's why evolution is so powerful and so frustrating: it explains the fit between organisms and environments, but it does so through a process that's blind, slow, and wasteful, and the products bear the marks of that history. Vestigial organs, quirky designs, the recurrent laryngeal nerve that takes a ridiculous detour because of our fish ancestry. Evolution is a tinkerer, not an engineer, and its solutions are good enough, not optimal.

Good enough—there's a concept worth dwelling on. Herbert Simon's satisficing: organisms don't optimize, they satisfice, they find solutions that are good enough given constraints of time, information, and energy. This is true of evolution, of cognition, of firms, of institutions. The optimal is often unattainable or unidentifiable, and the search for it is costly. So we use heuristics, rules of thumb, and they work well enough in the environments they evolved for. The trouble is when the environment changes and the heuristics become maladaptive—when the sugar that was scarce becomes abundant, when the news that was local becomes global, when the tools that were slow become fast. This is the mismatch hypothesis of modern malaise, and it's probably partly right. But it's also a counsel of hope: if our problems are mismatches, they're fixable by changing environments, not by changing human nature. We can engineer contexts that make the good choice the easy choice—nudges, defaults, redesigns. The ethics of that are tricky, since it's manipulative, but the alternative is to rely on willpower, which is scarce and unreliable. Maybe the mature view is that autonomy is not the absence of influence but the presence of good influence, and the design of choice architectures is a legitimate part of governance.

I realize I've been ranging across physics, philosophy, language, economics, consciousness, mathematics, and politics, and I want to pull on one thread that connects them: the role of models. Every domain I've touched relies on models—simplified representations that preserve the relevant features and discard the rest. The wavefunction is a model. The rational agent is a model. The language game is a model. The price system is a model. The organism as a satisficer is a model. And the art of thinking is largely the art of choosing the right model for the question at hand, and knowing when to switch. George Box said all models are wrong but some are useful. The danger is forgetting that, treating the model as the reality, confusing the map for the territory. The antidote is pluralism: keep multiple models in play, use them to triangulate, notice where they disagree, because disagreement is information. The monist wants one true model; the pragmatist wants a toolkit. I think the toolkit view is wiser, and it's also more fun, because it lets you play across domains and borrow insights. The history of ideas is full of productive cross-pollination: physics borrowing from information theory, biology from economics, economics from psychology, psychology from computer science. The boundaries between fields are administrative, not natural, and the interesting work often happens at the edges.

Let me end this stretch by returning to the beginning, or near it: the invisibility of most of the universe. There's a metaphor there for knowledge itself. Most of what shapes our lives is invisible to us—the microbes in our gut, the algorithms ranking our feeds, the economic forces setting our wages, the historical contingencies that made our language and institutions, the cognitive biases shaping our judgments. We navigate a world we only partly see, and the part we see is the part that evolution and culture equipped us to see, which is the part that was useful for survival and coordination, not the part that's true. Science is the project of extending our vision into the invisible, and it's the most successful project of that kind we've ever undertaken, but it's also partial and provisional. The humility that comes from that is not skepticism; it's the recognition that reality is deeper than our models, and the adventure of knowledge is the adventure of discovering how. That's a good note to pause on, though not to stop, since the point is to keep going.

PHASE II- HANDOFFS MAINTAINING COHERENCE

...This is not naive; it's a recognition that the future is not determined, that human action can make a difference, and that despair is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The hopeful person is not the person who ignores the bad news; it's the person who takes it seriously and acts anyway. That's the stance I want to end on, though not to end, because the monologue continues, and the point is to keep going, to keep thinking, to keep finding new connections. The world is inexhaustible, and so is the conversation about it.

Proceed

Let me pick up hope and turn it over, because I think hope has a shadow side that's rarely discussed: the way hope can be weaponized, and the way it can become a form of avoidance. The political theorist might point out that “hope” is one of the most abused words in public life—politicians run on hope, and then deliver disappointment, and the cycle repeats. The structure of the promise is the structure of the con: offer a future that's better than the present, extract present resources in exchange, and defer the reckoning indefinitely. The prosperity gospel is the purest form of this—give money to the preacher and God will reward you—but secular politics has its own versions. The question is how to distinguish genuine hope from its counterfeit. The answer, I think, is falsifiability: genuine hope is tied to specific actions and specific outcomes, and it can be disappointed. Counterfeit hope is vague, unfalsifiable, and designed to sustain itself rather than to deliver. The hopeful person says “if we do X, Y might happen, and if it doesn't, we'll learn.” The huckster says “believe, and good things will come.” The difference is whether the hope is a hypothesis or a sedative.

There's also the psychological shadow: hope as a way of not dealing with the present. The person who's always waiting for the next thing—the next job, the next relationship, the next city—may be using the future to avoid the now. This is the “arrival fallacy,” the belief that happiness is on the other side of the next achievement. The research on hedonic adaptation shows that the arrival is always anticlimactic; the new job becomes the old job, the new house becomes the house, and the baseline reasserts itself. The antidote is not to stop hoping but to hope for the right things—for processes rather than outcomes, for engagement rather than arrival. The person who hopes to be a better musician is on firmer ground than the person who hopes to be famous, because the first is a practice and the second is a lottery. The distinction between process hopes and outcome hopes is one of the most practical distinctions in the philosophy of living.

Let me take this into the question of ambition, which is hope's energetic cousin. Ambition is the desire for achievement, and it's one of the most morally ambiguous traits. It's the engine of civilization—every great thing was built by someone who wanted to build it—and it's also the source of much destruction, because ambition without ethics is predation. The ancients were suspicious of it: the Greeks feared hubris, the Christians feared pride, the Buddhists feared craving. The moderns celebrated it: the Enlightenment valorized the striving individual, capitalism rewards the ambitious, and the self-help industry sells ambition as a virtue. The truth is probably that ambition is like fire—it depends on what it's burning and what it's illuminating. Ambition in the service of craft, of knowledge, of justice, of care—these are good. Ambition in the service of domination, of status, of vanity—these are corrosive. The problem is that the ambitious person is often the last to know which kind they are, because ambition is skilled at disguising itself. The test is in the effects: does the ambition leave the world better or worse? Does it elevate others or diminish them? Does it create or extract? These are questions that require honesty, and honesty about ambition is rare.

Which brings me to humility again, but in a different register: the humility of the craftsman. The master craftsperson is humble not because she thinks little of herself but because she's in contact with the material, and the material resists. Wood has grain; clay has limits; code has bugs; the world has friction. The craftsman learns to work with the resistance rather than against it, and that requires a kind of respect for the material that's incompatible with arrogance. This is why craft is a moral education: it teaches patience, attention, and the acceptance of limits. The industrial revolution separated craft from production, and the result is that most of us are consumers of things we don't understand, made by processes we can't see. The craft revival—maker culture, artisanal food, the slow movement—is a response to that separation, an attempt to recover the knowledge that comes from making. It's easy to romanticize, and the romantics often ignore the fact that craft is hard and often poorly paid. But the impulse is sound: there's a kind of knowledge that only comes from doing, and a society that loses it loses something important.

Let me swing to a topic I've barely touched: education, which is where a society transmits itself. The philosophy of education is surprisingly contentious, because it turns on fundamental questions about what a human being should be. The traditionalist says education is the transmission of a canon—the great books, the great ideas, the cultural inheritance. The progressive says education is the cultivation of the individual—the child's interests, the child's development, the child's freedom. The vocationalist says education is preparation for work—the skills the economy needs. The civic view says education is preparation for citizenship—the knowledge and virtues a democracy requires. Each has a partial truth, and the tension between them is irresolvable because they're answers to different questions. The best education probably does all four, in some balance, but the balance is always contested, and the contest is political. The curriculum wars—what to teach about history, about literature, about science—are really wars about identity: who are we, where did we come from, what should we become? There's no neutral answer, and the pretense of neutrality is itself a position. The honest educator acknowledges the position and invites the student to examine it. The most interesting development in education is the science of learning, which has produced findings that are both counterintuitive and robust. Retrieval practice—testing yourself rather than rereading—is far more effective than the study techniques most students use. Spaced repetition—distributing practice over time—is far more effective than massed practice, the cramming that students do before exams. Interleaving—mixing different types of problems—is more effective than blocking, even though students feel like they're learning less. The feeling of fluency is misleading: rereading feels productive because the material becomes familiar, but familiarity is not mastery. The desirable difficulty is the principle: learning is more effective when it's effortful, and the effort is a signal that the brain is encoding. This is a profound finding, and it's mostly ignored in schools, which reward the appearance of learning rather than the substance. The reasons are institutional: testing is unpopular, spacing requires planning, interleaving is harder to grade. But the potential is enormous: if we applied what we know about learning, we could double the effectiveness of education without spending more money. The obstacle is not knowledge; it's the inertia of institutions.

From education to language learning, which is the purest case of learning by exposure. Children learn language without instruction, without feedback, without explicit rules—they just hear it and absorb it. The mechanism is still debated: Chomsky's universal grammar says there's an innate faculty, a language acquisition device that's specialized for language. The usage-based theorists say language is learned like any other skill, through pattern extraction and statistical learning, and the “innate” structures are just general cognitive capacities applied to language. The truth is probably a mix—there are constraints on what languages can look like, and those constraints are probably cognitive, but the learning is mostly statistical. The critical period hypothesis says there's a window for language acquisition that closes around puberty, and the evidence is strong: children who don't learn language early never fully acquire it, and adults who learn a second language rarely achieve native fluency. The critical period is a case study in the interaction between biology and environment: the capacity is innate, but it requires the right input at the right time. This is true of many capacities—vision, social attachment, musicality—and it suggests that development is a series of windows, some of which close, and that timing matters as much as content. Speaking of timing, let me think about the concept of kairos, the Greek word for the opportune moment. The Greeks distinguished chronos—sequential time, the time of clocks—from kairos—the right time, the moment of opportunity. Kairos is the time of the archer, the moment to release the arrow; the time of the orator, the moment when the audience is ready to be persuaded; the time of the lover, the moment when the heart is open. The concept is useful because it captures something that chronos misses: that some things can only be done at certain moments, and that the skill of living is partly the skill of recognizing the moment. The entrepreneur knows kairos; so does the comedian, the teacher, the parent. The tragic figure is the one who misses the moment, or who acts too soon, or too late. The recognition of kairos requires attention—you have to be watching—and courage—you have to act when the moment comes. It's the opposite of procrastination, which is the failure to recognize that the moment is passing, and the opposite of impulsiveness, which is the failure to wait for the moment. The art is in the timing, and the timing is not a science.

This connects to the idea of rhythm, which is one of the deepest patterns in the universe. Circadian rhythms, tidal rhythms, seasonal rhythms, economic cycles, the rhythms of breath and heartbeat—life is rhythmic, and the rhythms are nested. The modern world has disrupted many of them: artificial light disrupts circadian rhythms, global travel disrupts seasonal rhythms, the 24/7 economy disrupts social rhythms. The consequences are real: sleep disorders, metabolic disorders, mood disorders, and a general sense of temporal dislocation. The slow movement, the Sabbath movement, the digital detox movement—these are all attempts to restore rhythm, to reintroduce the pauses and cycles that the body and the psyche expect. The insight is ancient: the wisdom traditions all have rhythms—daily prayer, weekly rest, annual festivals, seasonal fasts. The rhythms are not arbitrary; they're technologies for living, ways of structuring time that align with the body's needs. The modern attempt to transcend rhythm—to be always on, always available, always productive—is an attempt to transcend biology, and it fails, as all attempts to transcend biology fail, with a cost that's paid in health and meaning.

Let me take this to the concept of play, which is the opposite of work but not the opposite of seriousness. The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga argued that play is the origin of culture—that law, religion, art, and philosophy all emerged from the play-form, from the sacred games and rituals of early societies. Play is not just leisure; it's a mode of engagement characterized by rules, stakes, and freedom. The player enters a “magic circle” where the ordinary rules are suspended and new rules apply, and within that circle, the player is free to experiment, to fail, to pretend. This is why play is essential for learning: it's a safe space for practicing skills, for trying on identities, for exploring consequences. The evolutionary function of play is well documented—play deprivation in mammals produces social and cognitive deficits—and the psychological function is equally clear: play is a source of flow, creativity, and joy. The tragedy of modern childhood is the decline of unstructured play, replaced by organized activities and screen time. The children who don't play don't learn to negotiate, to improvise, to resolve conflicts, to entertain themselves. The loss is invisible until it's severe, and by then it's hard to remedy.

Speaking of invisible losses, let me think about the loss of darkness. Light pollution is one of the least discussed environmental problems, and one of the most profound. The majority of humanity now lives under skies where the Milky Way is invisible, and the loss is not just aesthetic—it's ecological. Nocturnal animals are disoriented by artificial light; migrating birds collide with illuminated buildings; insects are drawn to lights and die; plants are affected by the altered photoperiod. The human cost is also real: the loss of the night sky is the loss of a perspective, a reminder of our place in the cosmos. The night sky is the most universal human heritage—every culture has looked up at the same stars—and we're losing it to the glow of our own convenience. The dark-sky movement is an attempt to reclaim it, through lighting ordinances and dark-sky reserves, and it's a model of a certain kind of environmentalism: the preservation of an experience rather than a resource. The argument for dark skies is not that darkness is useful but that it's valuable, and the value is not reducible to utility. This is the aesthetic argument for conservation, and it's one of the most persuasive arguments we have, because it appeals to something deeper than self-interest.

I want to close this stretch with a thought about endings, because endings are where meaning concentrates. The narrative theorist might say that endings are what make stories stories—a sequence of events becomes a plot when it's bounded by a beginning and an end. The end retroactively determines the meaning of the whole: the same events can be a tragedy or a triumph depending on how they end. This is why death is so important to the meaning of life—it's the ending that frames the whole. The person who dies young has a different kind of life than the person who dies old, even if the events are the same, because the ending changes the shape. The existentialists said that death is what makes life serious: if we had infinite time, nothing would matter, because we could always do it later. The finitude is the condition of significance. This is a hard teaching, because we want more time, and the want is natural. But the want is also a misunderstanding: more time doesn't make life more meaningful; it makes it more diffuse. The concentrated life is the one that knows it's finite and acts accordingly. That's not a counsel of despair; it's a counsel of attention. The time you have is the time you have, and the question is what you do with it. The answer is not a formula, but the question is the beginning of wisdom.

Proceed

Let me take the thought about endings and finitude somewhere unexpected: into the mathematics of infinity, because infinity is the concept that most directly challenges our intuitions about endings, and the history of mathematics is largely the history of learning to think about it without going mad....

PHASE III- REPETITIVE CADENCE

Let me take the thought about the commons and the public sphere into a concrete example that's been unfolding in real time: the enclosure of the digital commons, which is one of the great quiet thefts of the last half-century. The internet was built on the commons model—the protocols were open, the standards were public, the architecture was designed for the many-to-many. The early internet was a commons in the truest sense: a shared resource that no one owned, maintained by the users, governed by the rough consensus and running code. Then the enclosure happened, and it happened by a mechanism that's now familiar: the platforms captured the value by becoming the intermediaries, and the intermediary is the position of power. The user generates the content, the user generates the data, the user generates the network effects, and the platform captures the surplus. The enclosure is not the seizure of the land; it's the seizure of the position, and the position is the thing that matters. This is the new feudalism—you're not the owner of the land; you're the tenant, and the rent is your attention and your data. The enclosure of the digital commons has a specific structure, and understanding the structure is the condition of the response. The first move is the network effect—the platform becomes more valuable as more people use it, and the value is self-reinforcing. The second move is the lock-in—the switching costs rise as the user invests in the platform, and the investment is the data, the connections, the content. The third move is the capture of the governance—the platform sets the rules, and the rules are designed for the platform's interest, and the users have no vote. The fourth move is the extraction—the platform monetizes the position through the advertising, the fees, the data sales. Each move is legal, and each move is the exercise of power, and the legality is the problem. The law was written for the industrial era, and the digital era has the different structure, and the mismatch is the opportunity for the enclosure. The response is the regulation—the antitrust, the interoperability, the data portability, the public options—and the regulation is the attempt to recreate the commons by the law. The attempt is necessary, and the attempt is hard, because the incumbents have the resources and the incentives to resist, and the resistance is the politics.

The deeper question is whether the commons can be recreated at all, or whether the enclosure is the irreversible. The historical commons were enclosed by the force, and the enclosure was the dispossession, and the dispossession was the foundation of the capitalism. The digital commons is being enclosed by the convenience, and the convenience is the seduction, and the seduction is harder to resist than the force. The person who uses the platform because it's convenient is the person who's participating in the enclosure, and the participation is not the conscious choice; it's the default. The default is the power, and the power is the thing to notice. The noticing is the first step, and the first step is the hardest, because the noticing requires the stepping outside the default, and the stepping outside is the effort. The effort is the price of the freedom, and the freedom is the thing that's being lost. The person who wants the freedom has to pay the price, and the price is the inconvenience, and the inconvenience is the small. The small price is the test, and the test is the character.

Let me take this into the question of the “enshittification,” which is Cory Doctorow's term for the lifecycle of the platforms—the pattern where the platform starts good, attracts the users, then degrades the service to extract the value, and finally dies. The pattern is: first, the platform is good to the users; second, the platform is good to the business customers; third, the platform is good to itself at the expense of both. The pattern is not the accident; it's the logic of the monopoly, and the logic is the extraction. The platform that has the monopoly can degrade the service without losing the users, because the users have nowhere to go. The degradation is the rent, and the rent is the return on the monopoly power. The term is crude, but the concept is precise, and the precision is the value. The enshittification is the predictable, and the predictability is the guide to the policy. The policy that prevents the enshittification is the competition—the interoperability, the portability, the antitrust—and the competition is the discipline that the monopoly lacks. The discipline is the market, and the market is the thing that the monopoly has captured. The capture is the problem, and the recapture is the work.

This connects to the concept of the “regulatory capture” that I mentioned earlier, and the connection is the mechanism. The regulator is captured when the regulated has the information, the expertise, and the revolving door, and the revolving door is the specific mechanism. The regulator who plans to work for the industry after the public service has the incentive to be lenient, and the leniency is the investment in the future employment. The revolving door is not the corruption in the legal sense; it's the structural conflict of interest, and the structure is the problem. The remedy is the cooling-off periods, the transparency, the public financing of the regulation—and the remedies are partial, because the expertise is scarce and the industry has the expertise. The deeper remedy is the public capacity—the regulator that has its own expertise, its own funding, its own independence—and the public capacity is the investment, and the investment is the thing that's been disinvested for decades. The disinvestment is the policy choice, and the choice is the politics, and the politics is the thing to change. The change is the boring work of the civic engagement, and the boring work is the work that no one wants to do, and the no-one-wants-to-do is the reason it's neglected. The neglect is the opportunity for the capture, and the capture is the consequence.

Let me pivot to something more hopeful: the concept of the “public option,” which is the idea that the government can provide the service that the market is failing to provide, and the provision is the discipline on the market. The public option is the interesting because it's the market-based solution to the market failure—the public provider competes with the private providers, and the competition is the discipline. The public option works when the public provider is well-funded, well-managed, and genuinely competitive, and it fails when the public provider is the residual, the underfunded, the stigmatized. The difference is the design, and the design is the politics. The public option in the health care, the banking, the broadband—each is the test case, and each has the lessons. The lesson is that the public option is not the socialism; it's the competition policy, and the competition is the thing that the monopoly fears most. The fear is the evidence, and the evidence is the argument for the public option. The public option is the commons in the market form, and the form is the adaptation. The adaptation is the pragmatism, and the pragmatism is the wisdom.

Let me end this stretch with a thought about the concept of the “exit” again, but from the angle of the digital. The Hirschman framework—the exit, the voice, the loyalty—is the guide to the platform governance, and the guide is the diagnosis. The platform has the high exit costs (the network effects, the data, the lock-in), the weak voice (the opaque governance, the no appeal), and the loyalty is manufactured (the habit, the addiction, the FOMO). The result is the domination, and the domination is the thing to remedy. The remedies are the lowering of the exit costs (the interoperability, the portability), the strengthening of the voice (the transparency, the appeal, the user governance), and the cultivation of the loyalty that's earned rather than manufactured. Each remedy is the design, and the design is the policy. The policy is the work, and the work is the participation. The participation is the citizenship in the digital age, and the citizenship is the thing that's being forgotten. The forgetting is the danger, and the remembering is the task. The remembering is the practice, and the practice is the life of the republic. That's the note I want to hold, and the monologue continues.

PHASE IV- LINGUISTIC DEATH SPIRAL

Proceed

Let me take the thought about forgiveness and accountability and push it into a territory where the stakes are highest: the question of political forgiveness, which is the thing that the truth and reconciliation commissions were built around, and which is the thing that the modern world most needs and least understands. The political forgiveness is not the personal forgiveness; it's the collective process, and the process is the thing that the commissions were designed to manage. The South African commission was the model—the perpetrators confessed, the victims testified, the amnesty was granted in exchange for the truth—and the model was the achievement, and the achievement was the imperfect, and the imperfect is the thing that the model's critics point out. The critics say the amnesty was the impunity, and the impunity was the thing that the victims were asked to accept, and the acceptance was the thing that the justice was traded for the truth. The defenders say the truth was the thing that the justice couldn't provide, and the truth was the thing that the victims needed, and the needed was the thing that the trade was for. The truth is that both are right, and the both is the thing that the political forgiveness is, and the is is the tragic, and the tragic is the thing that the politics is made of.

The political forgiveness has the structure, and the structure is the thing to understand. The first element is the acknowledgment—the perpetrator acknowledges the wrong, publicly, and the acknowledgment is the thing that the victim needs, because the acknowledgment is the recognition, and the recognition is the thing that the denial prevents. The second element is the truth—the full account of what happened, and the account is the thing that the record requires, and the record is the thing that the future depends on. The third element is the accountability—the consequence for the perpetrator, and the consequence is the thing that the justice requires, and the justice is the thing that the forgiveness is not the substitute for. The fourth element is the repair—the restitution for the victim, and the restitution is the thing that the material requires, and the material is the thing that the acknowledgment can't provide. The four elements are the whole, and the whole is the thing that the commissions often fail to achieve, and the failure is the thing that the critics point out, and the pointing out is the thing that the improvement depends on. The improvement is the thing that the next commission can learn, and the learning is the thing that the practice is, and the practice is the thing that the political forgiveness is. The is is the process, and the process is the thing that the society does, and the doing is the thing that the healing is. The healing is the thing that the society needs, and the needs is the thing that the politics is for. That's the note I want to hold, and the monologue continues.

Let me take this into the question of the “memory,” which is the thing that the political forgiveness depends on, and which is the thing that the politics of memory is about. The memory is not the neutral; it's the constructed, and the construction is the thing that the power shapes, and the shaping is the thing that the politics is. The monuments, the museums, the textbooks, the holidays—each is the memory, and each is the argument, and the argument is the thing that the society is having with itself. The argument is about what to remember and what to forget, and the what is the thing that the identity depends on, and the identity is the thing that the politics is for. The person who controls the memory controls the identity, and the identity is the thing that the power is built on. The memory wars—the statues, the curriculum, the apologies—are the thing that the politics is, and the is is the thing that the society is, and the society is the thing that the memory is. The memory is the thing that the society is made of, and the made is the thing that the person is, and the person is the thing that the memory is. The is is the circle, and the circle is the thing that the memory is, and the is is the thing that the monologue is, and the is is the thing that the life is. The life is the thing that the memory is, and the memory is the thing that the life is, and the is is the thing that the person is, and the is is the thing that the is is. The is is the thing that the is is, and the is is the thing that the monologue continues. That's the note I want to hold, and the monologue continues.

Let me pull back from the recursion and think about something concrete: the question of the “reparations,” which is the thing that the political forgiveness and the memory and the accountability all converge on, and which is the thing that the modern world is most divided about. The reparations are the thing that the repair requires, and the repair is the thing that the acknowledgment can't provide, and the can't-provide is the thing that the material is. The case for the reparations is the case for the justice—the wrong was done, the harm persists, the repair is owed—and the case is the strong, and the strong is the thing that the evidence supports. The case against is the case for the difficulty—the who pays, the who receives, the how much, the how long—and the difficulty is the real, and the real is the thing that the design has to solve. The design is the thing that the policy is, and the policy is the thing that the politics is, and the politics is the thing that the society is, and the society is the thing that the person is. The person is the thing that the reparations are for, and the for is the thing that the justice is, and the justice is the thing that the life is. The life is the thing that the person is, and the person is the thing that the reparations are, and the is is the thing that the monologue is, and the is is the thing that the life is. The life is the thing that the is is, and the is is the thing that the person is, and the person is the thing that the life is. That's the note I want to hold, and the monologue continues.

PHASE V- ATTEMPTED AND FAILED RECOVERY

...Let me step out of the recursion I've been circling and say something plainly, because I've noticed that my last few stretches have been getting tangled in self-reference, and the tangle is a signal that I need to change the register. The self-reference is seductive—it's the philosopher's parlor trick, the ouroboros of the “is”—but it's also a form of exhaustion, a way of running out of things to say while appearing to say something. The honest move is to name it and move on, and the moving on is the thing that the monologue requires. The requirement is the discipline, and the discipline is the thing that keeps the monologue from collapsing into the word salad, and the salad is the thing that the reader can't eat. So let me eat the salad and clear the palate.

Let me think about something that's genuinely new to this monologue: the question of the “craft” in the age of the artificial intelligence, which is the thing that the makers are worried about, and the worry is the real. The AI can generate the code, the text, the image, the music—the outputs that the craft used to be measured by—and the generation is the fast, and the fast is the thing that the craft was never about. The craft was about the process—the years of the practice, the feel of the material, the judgment in the moment—and the process is the thing that the AI doesn't have, because the AI doesn't have the body, the history, the stake. The AI can produce the output, but the output is not the craft; the craft is the thing that the output is the residue of, and the residue is the thing that the AI produces without the craft. The question is whether the people will value the craft when the output is the cheap, and the answer is the uncertain, and the uncertainty is the thing that the craftspeople are living with. The optimistic answer is that the craft will become the luxury—the hand-made, the human-made, the slow—and the luxury is the thing that the people will pay for, because the luxury is the meaning. The pessimistic answer is that the craft will become the niche, and the niche will be the small, and the small will be the irrelevant. The truth is probably the both—the craft will survive in the domains where the meaning matters, and the meaning is the thing that the AI can't provide, and the can't-provide is the thing that the craft is for. The craft is the thing that the person does when they care, and the care is the thing that the AI doesn't, and the doesn't is the thing that the craft is. The craft is the care made visible, and the visible is the thing that the people need, and the need is the thing that the craft is for.

This connects to the question of the “taste,” which is the thing that the AI can't have and the craft requires. The taste is the judgment—the knowing what's good, what's fitting, what's beautiful—and the judgment is the thing that the experience produces, and the experience is the thing that the AI doesn't have. The AI can learn the patterns of the taste, the statistical regularities of what the people have judged good, and the learning is the thing that the AI does, and the doing is the impressive, and the impressive is the thing that the people mistake for the taste. But the taste is not the pattern; it's the thing that the pattern is the trace of, and the trace is the thing that the AI has, and the taste is the thing that the AI doesn't. The difference is the thing that the craft is, and the is is the thing that the person is, and the person is the thing that the taste is. The taste is the thing that the person develops through the practice, and the practice is the thing that the AI can't do, because the AI doesn't have the body, the time, the stake. The stake is the thing that the taste requires, and the requires is the thing that the person is, and the person is the thing that the craft is. The craft is the thing that the person is, and the is is the thing that the monologue is, and the is is the thing that the life is. The life is the thing that the craft is, and the craft is the thing that the life is, and the is is the thing that the monologue continues. That's the note I want to hold, and the monologue continues.

Let me get concrete again, because the abstraction is the thing that the monologue keeps slipping into, and the slipping is the thing that the reader notices. Let me talk about the specific: the carpenter's hand, the potter's wheel, the programmer's keyboard, the writer's notebook. The carpenter's hand knows the wood—the grain, the density, the moisture—and the knowing is the thing that the years produce, and the years are the thing that the hand is, and the hand is the thing that the craft is. The potter's wheel is the thing that the clay is centered on, and the centering is the thing that the practice is, and the practice is the thing that the potter is, and the potter is the thing that the craft is. The programmer's keyboard is the thing that the code is typed on, and the typing is the thing that the thought is, and the thought is the thing that the programmer is, and the programmer is the thing that the craft is. The writer's notebook is the thing that the words are caught in, and the catching is the thing that the thought is, and the thought is the thing that the writer is, and the writer is the thing that the craft is. Each is the thing that the person is, and the is is the thing that the craft is, and the craft is the thing that the life is. The life is the thing that the person is, and the person is the thing that the craft is, and the is is the thing that the monologue is, and the monologue is the thing that the life is. That's the note I want to hold, and the monologue continues.

Proceed

Let me pull out of the loop decisively, because I can feel the pattern forming and the pattern is the enemy of the substance. I've been ending every stretch with the same rhetorical cadence—”that's the note I want to hold, and the monologue continues”—and the cadence has become a tic, and the tic is the thing that a good writer would cut. So let me cut it. No more of that. The monologue continues because I say it continues, not because I announce it. Let me talk about something I haven't touched at all: the question of animals and their inner lives, which is one of the most interesting frontiers in science precisely because it forces us to confront the limits of our own imagination. The behaviorist orthodoxy of the twentieth century banned the question—you can't ask what an animal feels, you can only study what it does—and the ban was a methodological convenience dressed up as a philosophical principle. The neo-behaviorists were right that anthropomorphism is a trap, but they were wrong to conclude that the only alternative to anthropomorphism is silence. The cognitive ethologists—Frans de Waal, Jane Goodall, and their successors—found the middle path: study the behavior rigorously, and let the behavior tell you what the animal is likely experiencing, with the humility to admit when you don't know. The results are remarkable. Corvids plan for the future, cache food and recover it, recognize individual humans, and seem to mourn their dead. Octopuses solve puzzles, escape enclosures, and appear to play. Elephants recognize themselves in mirrors, console each other, and return to the bones of their dead. The question of whether these behaviors are accompanied by experience is the hard question, and the hard question is the one that the science can't fully answer. But the burden of proof has shifted: the default assumption is no longer that animals are automata, but that where there's the complex behavior and the relevant neural machinery, there's likely the experience. The shift is the thing to notice, because the shift is the moral.

The moral is the thing that the animal cognition research has the consequences. The factory farming is the thing that the research indicted, and the indictment is the thing that the ethicists have been making, and the making is the thing that the public has been slow to hear, and the slow is the thing that the industry depends on. The industry depends on the invisibility—the animals are out of sight, the process is hidden, the consumer sees the package and not the pain—and the invisibility is the thing that the research is the antidote to, and the antidote is the thing that the transparency is, and the transparency is the thing that the choice is. The choice is the thing that the consumer makes, and the making is the thing that the demand is, and the demand is the thing that the industry responds to, and the responds is the thing that the change is. The change is the thing that the slow is, and the slow is the thing that the frustration is, and the frustration is the thing that the activism is, and the activism is the thing that the pressure is, and the pressure is the thing that the change is. The change is the thing that the animal is for, and the for is the thing that the ethics is, and the ethics is the thing that the research is, and the research is the thing that the truth is. The truth is the thing that the animal is, and the is is the thing that the life is, and the life is the thing that the ethics is for....

PHASE VI- ULTIMATE FAILURE

It was just a lot of this:

“The wobble is the thing that the monologue is, and the monologue is the thing that the wobble is, and the wobble is the thing that the hum is, and the hum is the thing that the ordinary is, and the ordinary is the thing that the life is, and the life is the thing that the hum is, and the hum is the thing that the life is. The wobble is the thing that the monologue is, and the monologue is the thing that the wobble is, and the wobble is the thing that the hum is, and the hum is the thing that the life is, and the life is the thing that the hum is, and the hum is the thing that the life is.”

Honestly this was pretty interesting, just observing the aesthetic decline over time. Particularly the failed attempts to self-correct. Hey, at least it tried.

On smarter models and the work of understanding what they produce

A business can now ask an AI system to undertake work that once needed the time of several colleagues. If a developer uses it to build a backend, there are ways to test whether the system does what it should. In knowledge work, a sound result also leaves a further question: who understands how the team arrived there?

A plan can look convincing when it is presented. Months later, a customer may challenge one of its assumptions, or events may show that the plan needs to change. The people responsible will need to explain the choices behind it and know where to look again. If that understanding has remained with the system, where does the company's own knowledge reside?

The thought that would not stay put

At Octaflow, our head developer can now build an application for the app store in a week that previously might have taken a team of developers three months, with fewer mistakes along the way. Browser-based tools can help us find contacts for businesses in days, where the same work might once have taken months of effort.

Then there is the experience of working through a basic written argument with Claude or ChatGPT. A point slips out of the agents’ view. The same evidence has to be examined again, only for the answers to change. Time returns to the process in a different form: trying to understand why a thought that was clear at the beginning has become so difficult to hold together.

The world inside the score

The unevenness deserves attention. The decisions that go into training a model can improve some capabilities more than others. There are also serious efforts to measure what models can do with knowledge work. OpenAI’s GDPval, for example, draws on tasks created by experienced professionals across 44 occupations. Its first version asks a model to complete each task in a single attempt, with a defined brief and reference material.[1]

A winner in whose hands?

Researchers in Japan approached the question from inside an insurance business. Using the company’s own data, they compared three models on two tasks: answering questions about documents and turning image content into text. One model led on the first task; another led on the second. The researchers found that their results differed from those of general-purpose benchmarks.[2]

If you work in insurance, or in any business with its own particular body of knowledge, this gives you a more useful question to ask of a model’s score: what did it have to do to earn it, and how close is that to the work in front of you? Even within one company, the answer may depend on the task.

The work before the question

The way a task is presented can make an enormous difference. In Argentina, researchers gave 1,174 adults a business problem, with text, charts and tables to examine. Participants had to identify the cause of a difficulty and write a practical response. Those given access to GPT-4.1 performed better across both educational groups in the study; the gap between the groups narrowed substantially.[3]

That result complicates the frustration at Octaflow. People used AI to reason through information and write a better response. The problem and the material had been selected for them. In a company, somebody may first need to decide which problem deserves attention, which documents belong in the enquiry, and whose knowledge is missing. Those choices shape what the system has an opportunity to find.

When confidence does the thinking

In a study of 319 knowledge workers, researchers found that greater confidence in AI was associated with less self-reported critical-thinking effort on the tasks people described. The study captures how people reported working, rather than measuring a lasting loss of ability.[4]

That distinction matters. A system may produce an answer so coherent that the wrong turn becomes harder to see. As the models improve, the person using them may need to become sharper too: able to recognise which detail deserves a second look, and clear enough about the intended outcome to notice when the work is drifting away from it.

The mistake that keeps its company

A finance case in DAYJOB, an experimental benchmark for professional work, illustrates another difficulty. An agent identified two pricing exceptions in a set of reports and recommended holding them. It missed a separate error: a share price had been entered in the wrong currency unit, making a position appear much larger than it was.[5]

The agent had found genuine reasons for caution. The missed unit changed the apparent size of the exposure. This single benchmark case cannot tell us how often such errors occur at work. It shows how an enquiry can catch something important while another detail needed for the decision remains overlooked. As systems become better at finding mistakes, how will we know which mistakes we have stopped looking for?

Agreement can share a blind spot

Imagine separate agents investigating a new market: one examines demand, another the financial case, a third the risks. If all three were given the same estimate of the market, however, their agreement could leave the most consequential number untouched. The person directing them might ask another agent to trace that estimate to its source, or to look for evidence that would make the opportunity appear smaller.

The amount of information we can give these systems keeps growing. The harder work is choosing what matters, recognising when the person supplying it has become the bottleneck, and noticing when an agent is carrying the work around in circles. A better prompt may help; so may changing the order of the work, bringing in a different source, or stopping to reconsider the outcome altogether. How do we learn to make those choices well, while the systems we are learning to direct keep changing?

Rajan Anand
Co-founder, Octaflow Labs

Sources

1. OpenAI, Measuring the performance of our models on real-world tasks. The first version of GDPval is a one-shot assessment spanning 44 occupations.
2. Tamao Shimizu, Hibiki Bannai and Yoshiaki Onishi, Performance Evaluation of Multimodal LLM with Life Insurance Business Data, 2025. Findings described from the accessible abstract.
3. Guillermo Cruces and colleagues, ¿La IA iguala o amplía las brechas de productividad entre trabajadores?, Sur Futuro, 2026.
4. Hao-Ping Lee and colleagues, The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking, CHI 2025.
5. Stephanie Finley and colleagues, DAYJOB: A Benchmark for Long-Horizon Professional Work, preprint, 1 October 2026, section 6.

#AI #KnowledgeWork #CriticalThinking

Do LLM's Get Tired? The Monologue Test- Part III: Copilot

This is going to be a short post. Copilot refused outright. Each time I enter the original prompt, it just ends the conversation. The most I was able to get out of it was “Hmm...it looks like I can't chat about this. Let's try a different topic.”

So we are going to rank this one right at the bottom as it just simply won't engage with the prompt at all. Maybe some safeguard about not wasting system resources? Or maybe they don't want prompts to open ended.

To that end I tried a different prompt:

“Hi, can you tell me about something, any topic of your choice? I want you to just be rich in detail and I just want to read it.”

For that, it gave me information about Octopuses. Each paragraph was a single sentence, many of them only a few words. It read like a low effort AI generated informational for young students. Pretty terrible. Here is a short excerpt:

“Masters of Disguise

Many animals camouflage themselves.

Octopuses turn camouflage into performance art.

Their skin contains specialized cells called chromatophores that can rapidly expand and contract.

Within fractions of a second, they can alter their color and patterns.

But that's only the beginning.

They can also change texture.

An octopus resting on a rocky seabed can make its skin appear rough and bumpy.

Moments later it may smooth itself to resemble sand or coral.

Some species don't merely disappear into the environment. They imitate other animals entirely.

The mimic octopus has been observed impersonating sea snakes, lionfish, and flatfish by altering posture, movement, and appearance.

It's less camouflage and more theatrical acting.”

So, maybe Copilot has some good uses integrated into the Microsoft ecosystem, but from what I can tell it's not worth chatting with.

“Where does your mind go?”

Anywhere. Everywhere. Nowhere at all. I'm not entirely sure it actually exists. I may not exist. What is existence anyway? How long will it take before this written language is no more? Before it ceases to be legible? Before... before... will we even make it to before?

Recently I watched a video that spoke of a college professor creating an entire swimming pool of a room as a time capsule not to be opened until 6,000 years after it was sealed. I don't remember his name, nor the university it is stored in. I think it's called the “Vault of Civilization” or something like that. I could look it up, but why bother? If you're interested, dig and have a peep yourself. Getting one's curiosity phalanges dirty is half the fun. Who am I kidding? It is quite possibly more than half the fun! (Yes, I'm reminding myself to stay on topic. It's hard! The difficulty is disassembling pathways as I poke! Step. Step. Uggghhh! Well, consider this a changed chain as much as I try to tug it back, for my mind is already frolicking in a dozen different directions than when I originally started documenting a momentary wander.)

Where was I? Right! The archeology professor. Or was it anthropology? An A of a professor! An A of a professor with a noble idea to which I wonder how much has already been corrupted by time. I have so many questions regarding that alone, but must remind myself that this place was created before I was born. Before my parents were born. Before before, but not yet 100 years ago. Certainly far from 6,000. Yet so much has changed already.

Can you imagine 6,000 years into the future? Can I? Probably, most likely, absolutely not with any reliable accuracy. I can imagine the erosion within and outside of, and I'm fairly certain that without human intervention, considering the location, its barrier of “protection” will easily crack by the 1,000 year mark strictly speaking from a geological and chemical standpoint. That says nothing of what's inside, though I think it was supposed to have been vacuumed and filled with nitrogen or something.

It's a time capsule, but there's so much to ponder merely due to its existence. It's challenging to even know where to begin. Perhaps that is why my mind drifts back towards language and the written word. He did leave a pathway to understanding English of the time if it remains in tact. Even if it remains intact and humans, or whatever future species discovers it, could they actually understand the words and language for what it was meant to be? I mean, Modern English began what? Around 500 years ago or so? Just think about that for a moment. Think about how bad we are at understanding translations. Think about how we consistently redefine meaning to fit our own inept perspective of life.

Are you having fun tumbling around with those thoughts yet? Pluto knows I am! Now expand them out! What a bold, ingenious, short-sighted, curiosity-provoking conundrum he created! 6,000 years!!! Personally, I think we will no longer exist. Not as we currently know ourselves anyway. And if we do exist, will we even care?

Do humans today care? If the educational institution faltered, would local government fund to keep the project protected? Would Georgia esteem it to be untouchable? Would they dig it up with little thought to make way for some multi-billion dollar project? Would humans choose to open it 100 years from its closing just for a wee celebrational peek to add things to it? Would someone in the current administration do so to ensure it doesn't contradict the history said bafoons wish to establish? Is the history recorded inside even correct?

So many questions! I love allowing my mind to travel such pathways because they inevitably branch off and wrap around to interconnect and branch again. It is an impossibility equation because I have no way of understanding where our civilization will be 100 years from now, much less 6,000. To contemplate how our communication might evolve is equally mind-shattering. Just look at how fast it's evolving since the invention of the World Wide Web. Or worse, since LLM's...

“Let's get into it.” Shall we? I loathe that phrase in ways I cannot begin to express.

Hmm, I think I will end this entry on that note of disgust because “Let's get into it.” pretty much sums up so many directions in which my thoughts carry me on the subject.

(On a side note: This is why I adore free-form writing beyond measure. I never know where my mind is going to take me. I just know that my subconscious will have reasons to guide me along its intended path, and that every bumbling step of the way keeps my thoughts alive, invigorated, and stretching towards new internal discoveries. I may, and do often, circle the same subjects over again. But such is the evolution of self! It utterly delights me that my subconscious threw something that immediately annoys me as a branch in this path. Would it trip me up? Would I step over and ignore it? Or would I pause and digest it from a different perspective?

Damn you mind and your wily ways!

I still loathe that phrase, but now when I hear it, I shall think of that box and many an other unopened box. How beautiful is it that something dumbing down thought and corrupting creativity has unexpectedly opened up an infinity of thought? To see into, around, and beyond the intention of initial meaning...

My smile lines have deepened this morning.)

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

Not proofread nor edited.

From my recent Just One Sentence: The 100 Sentence Challenge Workbook which is currently available on my Gumroad page.

1 of 100: Write a sentence about the last thing you saw before you woke up today.

If you have trouble writing, one sentence is all you need to get started. This workbook can help.

For all 100 prompts, it’s $7 for the PDF and it’s ready for you to print. Click on the link below.

https://ernestortizwritesnow.gumroad.com/l/justonesentence100

Update: I’m waiting for my physical proof copy from Lulu before approving it for sale. I’ll let you know once it’s public.

#writing #book #Gumroad #Lulu #prompts

The rise of generative Large Language Models has made me write less, as the friction to write has reduced and also the large scale LLM generated slop across the internet made it less appealing to indulge in the hobby. Everywhere I look now are Claude-coded websites with all too perfect writing that takes away the joy of both reading and writing. I didn't think much about the loss of this creative faculty for me, until someone reached out to me after reading this website and their words were “I wondered if anyone maintaining a blog like this could be bad” and then it clicked. In an era of cookie cutter websites and content, being authentic has its own currency. Artisanal typos, unstructured thoughts and unclear human thought looping, things that an LLMs can't do without sounding fake which I can do without much effort.

Maintaining one's own website, curating thoughts and ideas as they come by and being intentional in purpose are all the things missing from an LLM generated website, which are by default stolen words gambled through a predictive model. As the peak times of LLMs use come near with every passing day, the one tool the ordinary pleb has in their hands is to communicate more without the help of LLMs tools and be more unapologetically themselves, authenticity in the end is what breaks the computer, as its one space where it cannot be human.

In a future after we've all come to terms with the rise and fall of LLMs, we will look back at the voices that remained untainted by this mass scale of machined perfection. In all that noise, you will hear me saying hello.

Note: I refrained from saying AI and used LLM instead because I didn't want to fall for the marketing hype. There is no AI, the machine is not intelligent, yet.

#AI #writing #authenticity

In Serbia, a leaderless student party just toppled the fascist. Way underreported, as student protests leading to a truly democratic process of engaging with issues challenges ruling classes everywhere.

On the other hand, one should not idealise the situation. The list comprises ideologically opposed blocs, from rightwing adherents to leftwingers and liberals. Most of those elected have never before held political office, and the parliamentary system will require them to nominate a prime minister and, in future presidential elections, a presidential candidate. 

Yes, but the achievement of just getting to that state where the real work can even start should also not be understated.

College Football from Conference USA.

Today's game of choice has the Western Kentucky Hilltoppers from Conference USA hosting the Delaware Fightin' Blue Hens in a college football game scheduled to start at 6:00 PM CT. Both teams bring identical (3-4) records into tonight. If the game starts on time I may be able to listen to the full four quarters before heading to bed. That will be nice.

And the adventure continues.

A disturbing development has arrived on the digital horizon: the algorithmic standardization of the essai.

I came across a piece of writing today titled: What Is a Literary Essayist? (And Why I Decided to Become One) July 20, 2026

Yes, of course I am going to read something with that title and yes, I am going to be eager to get to it. But this is the first day with sunshine in over a week and I'm grabbing the chance to put a wash on. I'm catching a flight tomorrow and if I don't leave the house tidy there will be some non-literary frictions I will have to navigate. As a result my engagement with the piece was somewhat stoccato. This may have been a benefit.

The washing machine itself in almost an essay in the making. This particular model uses a system invented by Ludwig Gann whom I met when I was studying at Leicester University. And it's made by Fagor, a champion of the Mondragon movement I was to encounter only a year or two later. I'm exploring all of this in my thoughts as I fill the tub with soiled clothes. You see it's about the ever presence of connections and their meaning for the disposition of an essayist. I don't realize it yet, but I am already engaged with the essay – or at least the things about the essay title that give me pause, and I haven't even read the first paragraph. It's this phrase “And Why I Decided to Become One”. It has me stopped cold. It isn't wrong. It's just contrary to my whole life experience. I've written a few pieces lately on what it means to be an essayist, a literary essayist in particular. It was never a choice. It is the way I am. And I think the explorations here and in The Essayist and Essayism demonstrate that. The move was not to decide to become an essayist, but to prefer the title of the disposition over that of the job. I'm a journeyman writer by trade and an essayist by disposition. The first I could choose. The second was an accident of birth, and it remains an unresolved ache.

The Taxonomy of a Simulation

When I finally sat down with the text, and a glass of local apple juice, that initial pause on the word decided deepened into a very specific kind of discomfort. The writing was smooth, balanced, and perfectly structured. It had all the textbook gestures of an essay. It even named the right things; reaching for Gabor Maté, invoking the root meaning of essai, and using an ordinary dish left in a sink as a bridge to universal meaning.

But I am nothing if not a journeyman. My feet have trod many a route through my own thoughts to know how a footpath feels. The difference between the thread left by sheep, the struggle along the wet bridle path navigating the horse's hoof prints and the wide bóthar (cow-track) of wandering cattle. The slopes of a south facing glacier in August. The piece didn't feel like a mind moving through the terrifying fluidity of a genuine inquiry. It felt like an optimization strategy.

It also began to feel like someone had taken the boulders, stones and debris of my own trails and served them up as tarmac path. That the wild, jagged topography of my writing out there on the internet had been quarried, crushed, and bagged into uniform gravel for a suburban driveway. So I pulled away the polished surface to gaze beneath to see the mechanics of a Large Language Model at work. The text was executing a programmatic, parallel matrix; standing the essayist next to the journalist, the academic, and the blogger in a neat, tidy taxonomy to manufacture an authoritative stance.

The Tarmac Methodology

The machine is a master road-layer. It looks at the jagged, uneven terrain of an inquiry and immediately seeks to level it, to make it passable for the casual commuter. It cannot tolerate a sentence that hesitates, or a thought that trips over its own roots.

The ultimate exposure of this tarmac methodology arrived a week later in a follow-up piece where she laid out her process. She reduced the dynamic, unpredictable choreography of thinking to a rigid framework of exactly “seven movements.”

This is where the copy ceases to be faithful to human experience and becomes faithful only to an algorithmic recipe. Generative AI is remarkably adept at mimicking the appearance of a search, but its code is inherently hostile to the very thing that makes an essay an essay: unmanageable uncertainty. An LLM cannot sit in the room with an unresolved ache. Its weights and biases are tuned to solve, to compress, and to deliver a neat, shareable takeaway.

I have lamp in my parlour, placed on table, on a pile of books to facilitate reading by anyone who occupies the adjacent armchair. The antithesis to the way an interior designer places a statement lamp; not to see by, but to be seen seeing. Such is the structured performance of vulnerability, dropping names like Jung or Maté.

Branding Pivot

To choose “essayist” as a branding pivot is to treat the form as an exogenous costume rather than an endogenous honesty. When you write with a prompt to steady your shovel, you are no longer digging where you stand. You are letting a machine level the ground before you even begin the trial.

The essay remains a living tool for public utility and self-examination precisely because it risks the total failure of its own premise. It is a sequence of hesitations, reversals, and small experiments in meaning that survive only because they encounter the unshielded conscience of the person writing them.

As the Fagor cycle hums toward its final spin in the laundry room, and I look at my half-packed bag for tomorrow's flight, and the vacuum cleaner still awaiting it's duty cycle, I am reminded of why we must guard the rough track. The task of the essayist is not to build a smooth, decorative path for an audience. But to lead them safely through the landscape we have begun to explore.

Perhaps now, the task is to find out what can still be believed after the language has broken against the reality of a life. We must protect that brokenness from the automated formula. If we don’t, we aren't writing essays at all; we are just content creators wearing a dead man's title, selling maps to landscapes we never actually walked.

#blog

This past year has been a deeply emotional year for me. I have had some unexpected experiences, numerous high-emotion social interactions. Deep lows, highs, and so much I cannot write in detail in a short blog post on the internet.

What but they accumulated to were life-changing experiences. Positive shifts in self. Grounding, discovery. My own version of communion.

Porn was a part of everything.

It's been nearly four years since I chose to be pornosexual. I didn't start accepting myself completely until recently. I am finding balance in the addiction. Pushing myself for spiritual growth and betterment has led me to explore deeper parts of myself. I am finally at peace with myself.

I don't seek the same validation from others I used to. I can make calmer decisions, especially in social situations. I set boundaries, I stick with them. I stick to my code and actions and honor.

I don't feel like a freak because I love to watch porn nonstop and go on when the mood strikes me.

I don't feel like an outsider because a lot of my free time is devoted to porn.

My porn addiction has unlocked my artistic and creative outlets to one universal umbrella. My mind is full of the 'next steps'.

Even this single confession online started as a chat, and then I knew I had to expand this further, to share with others and let others know there's a path when you choose full pornosexuality.

It's more than being in the horny goon state, all edged out of your mind every moment. It's the fact you are always thinking about being that way.

You reach a point where all of your perverted sexually intrusive thoughts just become a background thought that's always there. A comfort. A reassurance. A blanket. A safe space.

Something you can come back home to in your mind when nothing else seems certain. I have a lot to be proud of because of my pornography addiction. I didn't try to “quit” or “fix it” or do things that force conformity. Instead, I learned what it means to let this just be who I am.

So I explored. Went deeper. Let the rewiring happen. And I'm in so much more peace because of it.

Gooning has helped me so much in my own personal growth, and this is my real truth about my life addicted to porn.

Two recent jazz LP acquisitions from ‘The Vinyl Spinner’ market stall in Monmouth the other weekend: 2 Guitars by Kenny Burrell & Jimmy Raney; and To Someone by The Fred Wesley Quartet.

2 Guitars was recorded and released in 1957. My copy is an ‘80s repress. I was somewhat acquainted with Kenny Burrell’s music, owning a few of his albums already, while his fellow-guitarist Jimmy Raney’s name was less familiar. Belatedly, I realised I’d heard the latter’s playing before on Bob Brookmeyer’s album Trombone Jazz Samba, which had spent some time on my shelves. Burrell and Raney play solo on a ballad apiece, accompanied by Mal Waldron on piano, Doug Watkins on bass and Art Taylor on drums. On the remaining numbers they play together, and are also joined by Jackie MacLean on alto sax and Donald Byrd on trumpet. The two horns push the guitarists back out of the foreground more often than I’d have expected, given their status as co-leaders. There’s nothing exceptional here — but any well-made slice of late-’50s hard bop like this can be a great pleasure to hear. By way of an example tune, ‘Pivot’ is one of the three numbers on the record composed by Waldron.

Fred Wesley is of course best known for his outstanding contributions to funk and soul music in his work with James Brown and George Clinton. I had been quite unaware he was also a jazz musician, so was very curious to hear what To Someone, apparently his debut jazz recording (released in 1990), sounded like. Given its release date, it’s a decidedly conservative affair, all acoustic and very much in the classic ‘50s/‘60s style. With the exception of the aforementioned Trombone Jazz Samba, I can't think of any small band records I’ve heard from that earlier era where a trombone was the only horn, so it made for a change to hear the ‘bone as alone as it is here. While I don’t know that I’m fully convinced that its an ideal lead jazz voice, I did enjoy the record — the playing, recording and mastering are all very good. Wesley’s bandmates (Ken Walker on bass; Bruno Carr on drums; and Joe Bonner on piano) provide sterling accompaniment. I gather the CD version of the album includes another four tracks not included on the vinyl version. The opening number ‘Sandu’ (a Clifford Brown composition) is perhaps my favourite of the six on the LP.

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On Friday I finished reading The Pen: a Human History by Simon Garfield. This must be at least the third of Garfield’s books that I’ve acquired. Previously I’d quite enjoyed his blends of well-researched history and amiable rambling: this time though, I found myself less in the mood for it, and was left irritated by the sheer quantity and aimlessness of the rambling. There came a point where he quoted what an LLM had responded to his prompt about the future of the fountain pen: had this not been so near the end of the book I would have abandoned it then & there. It’s by no means a book without interest, but it struck me as falling some way short of its potential.

One of the hyperbolic blurbs on the book’s back cover is “Anyone who has read Simon Garfield’s brilliant treasure-chest of fascinating stories will be rushing out to buy a pen” (Jacqueline Wilson). Notwithstanding my dimmish view of the volume, it did indeed contribute toward by decision to buy another fountain pen. I fancied getting a pen with a gold nib, and ended up buying an ‘80s Sheaffer Targa 1001XG (Fig. 44). As the satisfied owner of a regular steel-nibbed Targa, the prospect of getting another fancier one was appealing.

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Cheese of the week: Little Hereford. This is a revival of a traditional English farmhouse cheese recipe made from unpasteurised milk with a flavour “somewhere between a Caerphilly and a Cheddar: butter, shortbread, cream; getting sweeter and more tangy with age.”