When I was younger, I thought the choice women my current age made to be alone was strange and sad. Now that I am this age, I see it in a very different light. I think they just grew tired of constantly needing to tiptoe and wear masks around partners who claimed to like them as they are, but showed otherwise. At some point, it's simply no longer worth the energy.

Tonight, I am sad. I am tired. I am alone. But at least I can mostly be myself. It is too bad I prefer having a partner. I'm not sure I still believe one exists for me. Sometimes, it would seem, that knowing ourselves becomes a liability. This world breaks my heart.

Also, I still think macaroni is disgusting. It's mushy, cheesy, bland, and I don't like the way it feels on my teeth. I don't care if the world loves it or if it's been baptized by truffles and lobster. It's still gross in my book, and I refuse to pretty up my words so that someone feels better about themselves. It's macaroni! I'm sure there's plenty of food I like that another might find beyond disturbing. The utter ridiculousness baffles me to the point of a mind-numbing stillness.

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

This morning we picked up keys to the house and have already moved a few things over to the new place: two small tables, two small chairs, some bottled water, a bit of food, paper towels, just things that could fit into one trip with her little Nissan Kicks. The big move, when strong, young men with a big truck come to move the furniture, will happen next Saturday. Until then, most of our “free time” will be spent boxing, bagging, and doing what in the way of moving chores we can manage.

And the adventure continues.

« Qu’est-ce qu’un artiste ?

Un philosophe qui n’a point besoin de philosophie. »

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« What’s an artist?

A philosopher who doesn’t need philosophy. »

Tawsert

What is love? What are its ingredients? What is its formula for success? These are questions that have inspired scholars and philosophers alike, motivating some of the greatest human creative achievements and masterpieces, from Dante to Shakespeare, from Cohen to Cave. My contribution here is only a tiny contemplation, one among an endless line of such contemplations, from the start to the end of humanity — a drop of rain in the wandering river of life.

Attraction — the pull that draws one in as if recognizing a deep chasm and falling into it all at once, where the power of gravity prevails before reason can respond. It is unconscious, erupting overhead like a cloudburst. It carries delight and electricity to the one whom it has befallen, even if unrequited. When shared, it flickers before either party has consciously acknowledged their choice. It can initially appear as fascination, desire, or lust, confounding the most mature of us.

Care and affection — the subtle dimension of small but powerful acts. The healing hand that appears suddenly to soothe the suffering. The pleasure that feels selfish but is always reciprocal. The attention that remains when all other eyes have withdrawn. The hand that meets one’s own when the journey seemed solitary. The kiss on the forehead and warm embrace when the pain has nowhere else to go. Its beauty lies in its endless manifestations.

Respect and devotion — attention held steady long after the novelty is spent, and the initial spark of electricity has transformed into a new kind of energy that tightens and stabilizes the entangled orbits of two bodies. It is neither vow nor worship per se, but the integration of vows into routine, and seeing through the eyes of another as predisposition. It is satisfaction by another — and only that other — where all other doors remain open — unforbidden to both — and yet both always choose their same-shared door. Exclusivity that is neither confinement nor imprisonment, but a unique realm known only to two, co-created and cohabited.

Unconditionality — giving that expects nothing in return, where the fundamental connection between two cannot be transacted or commodified. This facet holds nothing back, showing up without pretense or mask, to be wholly known without fear of judgment, ridicule, or rejection. Two people, their bodies and souls stripped naked, standing before one another, both saying to the other, “I accept all of you.” A beautiful and unparalleled dynamic only of partners who are able and willing to see connection as effort may live to experience.

Sacrifice — spending oneself never seen as loss. The give of surrender that is never extracted or exploited by the other, paid out in presence and in absence alike through the grief and longing only love can create, across unimaginable distances and extraordinary circumstances. Of all the facets, this is the one where both parties willingly give of themselves in ways the outer world never sees, where joy and sorrow, togetherness and loneliness, contentment and longing are all one and the same.

Love may or may not be universally experienceable, but each experience of love is unique to the those involved — a special and specific dynamic they create by the nature of who they are and the energy born between them — appearing differently between what others outwardly see and what the partners experience inwardly, inside and in-between. The world sees two people sitting across a cafe table from one another, but hidden from sight is the realm shared between them, a whole universe only the two of them can enter. A place called love.

#Intermundia #Excultio

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Notes:

1. This post may not look it, but its writing took nine months of patience and discipline. Love must be lived before it can be written.

2. Love is itself a bond, but not bondage — one that frees rather than shackles. Not two halves forming completion, but two wholes choosing something more in each other — interdependence rather than dependence, domestication rather than adventure, contentment rather than euphoria.

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By D. Bowman | Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

Note: event in Serbian, for local audience.

Shared Vision tokom jeseni povezuje Suboticu i Novi Sad kroz niz radionica, razgovora, predavanja i zajedničkog rada posvećenih novim oblicima umetničke saradnje, digitalnim alatima i kolektivnim modelima organizovanja.

Prvi deo programa biće održan od 18. do 20. septembra u prostoru Klara i Rosa u Subotici, gde će učesnici kroz razgovore i praktičan rad razmatrati načine na koje umetnici i kulturni radnici mogu da dele resurse, znanja i infrastrukturu, kao i mogućnosti za razvoj održivijih oblika zajedničkog rada.

Program se nastavlja od 19. do 21. oktobra u Galeriji SULUV u Novom Sadu. Poseban fokus biće na razvoju i testiranju digitalne platforme za umetničku zadrugu, na kojoj SULUV učestvuje kao partner iz Srbije. Platforma se razvija kao alat za kolektivno upravljanje, razmenu resursa i transparentnu saradnju među umetnicima i kulturnim radnicima, i predstavlja jedan od važnih rezultata međunarodnog projekta Shared Vision, koji se realizuje uz podršku programa Kreativna Evropa.

Tokom trodnevnog programa u Novom Sadu učesnici će kroz predavanja, razgovore, radionice i zajednički rad nastaviti da istražuju odnos umetničkih praksi, digitalnih tehnologija i zadružnih i drugih kolektivnih modela organizovanja. Cilj programa je da se kroz razmenu iskustava i konkretan rad otvore pitanja o tome kako mogu da izgledaju drugačiji modeli kulturne produkcije, na koji način se resursi mogu organizovati zajednički i koje vrste digitalnih alata mogu da podrže takve procese.

Rezultati rada biće predstavljeni kroz multimedijalnu izložbu u Galeriji SULUV, koja će biti otvorena od 21. oktobra do 6. novembra 2026. godine.

Program se odvija na srpskom jeziku i otvoren je za umetnike, kulturne radnike, kao i za širu zainteresovanu publiku. Učešće je besplatno, uz prethodnu prijavu zbog ograničenog kapaciteta prostora.

Prijava je dostupna putem prijavnog formulara.

JOURNAL 26 septembre 2026

Alors d’abord l'ex de shie était spécialiste en sécurité informatique. Il utilisait un vpn+un autre dispositif que je comprends pas, il est extrêmement difficile à pister même impossible. Il n’a jamais consulté de cartes et il devait utiliser un moteur de recherche qui n’enregistre pas les données. Les flics n’ont pas le disque dur, il avait disparu dans les deux ordis, et le mieux les caméras du quartier ont enregistré sa voiture trois fois avant jeudi et mercredi dans la nuit, mais jeudi la caméra de la rue est tombée en panne vers 4h du matin, pas toute seule, elle a été piratée. C’est frustrant mais ça donne quand même des informations sur la préméditation. Quand chie est sortie la caméra ne fonctionnait pas mais il était sûrement là avec sa voiture. Donc la voiture est au laboratoire ils vont la regarder à la loupe.

On est toutes fatiguées mais on tient Midori chan et asu reviennent demain, on se voit toutes demain après-midi, on va essayer dormir ça devrait le faire on est crevées .

#shieko

One week from now is my 5k event. I'm in the very final days of prep. I would say I'm in the second phase of it. I did all those interval runs, and stairmaster sessions, while wearing the weighted vest. Now I'm on to doing non-stop (no walking) runs without the vest. The plan for this all along was to do 7.77km runs. Intentionally longer than the event. I have done two so far. They went quite well. All the vest work has paid off. One more run to go on Monday morning, then stairmaster on Wednesday. Then that is it. Two rest days, and then the event day will finally be here. These last two sessions are really all about maintaining. Not gaining. The final run that is longer than the event is not necessary, but it is important to me anyway.

I do all my running here in the dark at around 3:00am. Nothing but me, and sometimes rabbits and skunks. A week from today I'm showing up at a start line in the daylight with over a thousand other runners. I'm quite anxious about anything that involves other people, so naturally I’m quite anxious about this. It is probably good for me even though there is a voice asking, why the fuck am I doing this?!? lol.

It feels quite good to feel this strong and fit. It also feels quite good knowing that after the event I will be off work until the 13th October. I find that the approaching event and vacation has pushed The News away from the forefront of my mind. It think it is healthy to allow all that to be on the backburner for awhile.

https://write.as/thingsleftunsaid/event-prep-2

Let today be sad. Breathe into it, feel the weight of it, and let it wash through you without judgment. You don't have to fix it. Sad days are perfect days too.

San Juan County, Colorado

Abbeville, Alabama

My friend Audrey

Mt. Airy (Mayberry), North Carolina

So I Have my bupropion that I was now prescribed, but I haven’t taken it yet. Part of me hopes that I can wait until I try mushrooms again, and if that is enough, then I do not need to start medication for my depression. But also things have just gotten way worse. This week has been a pretty consistent struggle with suicidal thoughts and it’s something that I’ve had the privilege of not being used to for a while. And honestly, I kind of just want some kind of hope that this will change and I wish I knew what caused this rather than just assuming it was because of all of the birthday stuff, because that feels excessive.

This was my first time at Explore DDD, I finally made it here after years of aspiring to.

Since moving to Turtle Island in January 2021, I have struggled a bit to find my tribe, work-wise. I felt very much at home earlier this year at Agile Open Northwest and this felt very similar. People exploring the intersection of software architecture, extreme programming and AI, all in a human-centric way.

I met up with some old friends, and made a bunch of new ones.

It’s one of those wonderful conferences where speakers attend each other’s sessions, very much a level playing field with a huge amount of cross-pollination of ideas. Lots of workshops, and a good sprinkling of really thought-provoking talks. I got to see Jessitron deliver her latest iteration of this talk live. Elizabeth and I ran our workshop on “non-authoritarian team practices” and none other than Woody Zuill showed up!

Thanks to Rebecca, the conference included a hands-on “Design Storm” where the whole conference self-organized into teams and were introduced to two domain experts from Denver Water. This was an opportunity to practice our techniques together, learn from each other, and solve an actual problem for a mission-led organization. The presentations this afternoon were just awesome, and I could see the folks from Denver Water were blown away.

But the highlight for me was probably the open space, which blossomed on this final day of the conference, with a bunch of us staying in the room, after the conference had closed, right up until we got kicked out of the room!

From left-to right:

• Steven Diamante, who co-hosted the workshop on building your own coding agent with me.
• Paul Rayner, founder and organizer of the conference.
• Marco Emrich, who has build a fascinating framework for evaluating different agentic coding setups, especially their performance at TDD.
• Chris Lucian, of the Mob Mentality podcast.
• Ted Young, of the JitterTed YouTube channel.
• Lada Kesseler, who was showing us her TDD Skill as we took this photo
• Mike Clement, who facilitated the open space

Some of my take-aways, off the cuff

People still care about getting agents to do TDD. There’s a lot of research going on here about how we might get agents to follow a really fine-grained TDD process. We had some deep discussions about the value of TDD (keeping the cost of change flat) and how most popular skills that claim to get agents to do TDD really don’t. We talked about the trade-offs with longer wall-time and token spend compared to one-shotting. I’m curious to see how these techniques might work with dumber, faster models.

Paul runs a great conference. I’ve known Paul for years, and he is a great facilitator. The vibe of the conference was super professional and a polished experience yet also very down-to-earth and collaborative. We finished the event with a big retro where we all left feedback for the organizers on sticky notes. I think everyone felt like a participant not just an attendee.

DDD is more relevant than ever. As LLMs get increasingly sophisticated at writing code, these timeless patterns for integrating human knowledge and decision-making into software, and making strategic decisions about the architecture are fundamental. With people like Matt Pocock and Gergely Orosz talking about this stuff, we’re starting to reach a mainstream audience.

Visual modelling is the future. This is a group of people that love to use visual models to represent ideas. We played with a bunch of home-rolled tools people have been building. I’m excited to see some of these folks at ComoCamp next year and dig deeper into these topics!

The red queen effect. Chris Lucian used expression this to refer to this feeling of having to run to stand still: that we’re now working perhaps harder than ever despite being more productive than ever. Something Jessitron also talked about. It was a running theme of the conference and a lasting puzzle for me.

Coding past each other? In this moment we’re experiencing a Cambrian explosion of software, with people able to easily turn their ideas into reality. Yet with this vast increase in the amount of stuff being produced, it’s impossible to keep track of what even your friends are doing, yet alone integrate it into your own thinking. The exploration is great, but I worry about the waste of good ideas going unheard. Events like this are a really valuable way to pick up on those ideas and get them noodling around in your brain.

Thanks to everyone who made this event happen, I’ve had a wonderful week here in Denver.

Late this afternoon I had the pleasure of listening to a loud conversation celebrating the “bold greatness” of he who is going to drive me to homicide by the very people he's going out of his way to crush. Thank you for that, thin walls of my dwelling. The dissonance is real, and my brain is woefully shattered. My heart? My soul? My...patience.

I'm attempting a smidgen of diplomacy in my scrawl, when I really want to be dropping f-bombs left and right and banging my head numb against a brick wall. Just for reference, I don't really bang my head against walls. I respect their right to remain erect and grant me the privacy to be naked in my own home too much to do that. However, in my itty bitty noggin, I am a headbanger extraordinaire. Especially when the batshit crazy invades my space.

Fucking hell! I just don't get it. Unless you're a pasty, rich, white guy who has dipped himself in Cheeto sludge in an attempt to get mistress number four to look past the latest STD you got while getting banged by Ronny in the truckstop head after a late night meet-n-greet with Jesus because you went and blew your kid’s college fund on some crypto scheme, what in the ever loving Hello Kitty makes you fall for that idiot's bullshit?

Where is an asteroid when you really need one?

Also, quit calling and texting me. I get that the election is a big deal where I'm at, and people are working themselves into a tizzy because oopsiedoodles the red sleight-of-hand fudged things up a bit too much. I'm just going to block. Know your audience. There's plenty of public writing with my actual name on it to clue you fuckers in on if I want to attend anything that has the names you're mentioning.

No. Just no.

They did the whole “send them to an island” thing. I wanted to open my door and request a one way plane ticket. A remote island where I'd need not be aware of the extraordinary amount of hatefulness, greed, and intentional ignorance in the world sounds like paradise. One of the young women in the group even passionately expressed that she hoped women's voting rights would be taken away because “she ain't got time fer that.”

Clearly.

I am now going to go make myself some healthy ice cream, pop a few glycine, slather myself in magnesium, begin the eight Dungeon Crawler Carl book, and hopefully sleep the night away. This shitshow needs to stop before all of the fumes ignite. (I'm looking at you, Supreme Court of the Useless and Deranged.)

I was perusing John French’s 1650 English translation of a text by Michael Sendivogius and found a tale of a poor alchemist who was visited once in a dream by an old man, and then spends his days trying to initiate another visit.

He, the poor alchemist, returns to the place where he had the vision of the old man where he “counterfeited a sleep, and lay with his eyes shut expecting the old man.” In the context of the text, caunterfeit means to feign, but it also means to forge by striking false coin, to pass metal off as gold. He tries to counterfeit his way back into an encounter as a forger would metal into gold.

Fittingly, his feigned sleep is answered in kind. Maddened “by alwaies thinking of the old man,” the alchemist receives “a false vision, in the likenesse of the old man.” Falsehood met with falsehood. Elsewhere the book gives likeness its greatest weight by stating the reader is “created after the likenesse of the great world, yea after the image of God.” One word names both our making and the bedside forgery. The text traces the false old man to the alchemist’s wanting, but never says what in a likeness would confirm or betray it, only that the false old man mirrors the falsehood performed by the alchemist.

The text hides as much as it reveals by never really telling us the ways of knowing a true encounter from illusion, or madness. But it does hint at the consequences for those who try forcing or faking their way into spaces that open only by invitation.

#Philology #Anomalology

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By D. Bowman | Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.