• this month started like most: overwhelming. while i usually take the contours of my life with relative grace, there’s something about this month that scares me. lots of decisions are being made in the next couple of weeks, let’s see if they’re correct—or at least worth the wait.
• ever since i’ve been writing more, the specter over my shoulder is starting to be exorcised. reality seems to be taking shape and i finally have the eyes to see it.
• i think i need at least ONE roommate. living alone is obviously a luxury most want but don’t receive, however, i’m starting to talk to myself way too much. it’s a habit i picked up in high school, regurgitating study material to myself silently in my school’s media center, but it’s ended up overstaying its welcome. i can clearly remember moving into my first apartment in dc rehearsing professional elevator pitch in front of my bathroom mirror wearing only a towel while hitting power poses. i recite monologues around my place too, of course thinking i’m preforming like there’s an eviction notice on my door. anyway, i think i just need a pet. i was cat-sitting for my friend momina a couple months ago (if you’re reading this hiiiiii) and i was immediately taken aback having another living thing in my home. i don’t necessarily ignore the silence, i didn’t really have the ears to hear the frequency. it’s like the cat’s signs of life widened my understanding by reminding myself adolescence, back when i was sharing a room with one or both of my siblings. i miss the noise.
• i think i’m attracted to men that are built and look like walruses.
• it’s fleeting, but i sometimes feel 17 again. it’s like i wake up and lose progress one day. sometimes i look in the mirror and see him staring back. is there something i’m missing?
• i think i’m the only person who knows about madi sipes & the painted blue. i found the band right before covid hit while i was visiting home for spring break. i was in a phase of isolating myself and illegally watching movies on my 2017 macbook air until 2 AM, using the last couple of dollars from my work study paycheck to buy snacks from the vending machine by my dorm. some say i might’ve been struggling financially—i’m gonna have to agree. anywayyyyy, the music is kinda made for people who want to imagine what sex is like without actually having to experience it (there has to be a better way to say this my god). it’s melodramatic, sometimes gaudy, but always good idc. these lyrics were tearing 19-year-old me apartttttt.

• i would’ve been that one grad student in elizabeth holmes’ chemistry lab praying on her downfall.
• i’m sitting at my desk trying to work but i think this job is genuinely making me depressed. it’s hard to explain but going to the office feels like a funeral procession—i find myself gravitating to all black outfits and walking somberly to the metro as if i’m awaiting the fate of my livelihood. last year when it was even worse (lol yeah that’s possible) and my mom would comment on how sad my eyes looked on facetime. i didn’t believe her at first but now it’s all see when i look at myself in passing. it’s draining. i just want these people to take me seriously like everyone else in my life. why can’t they see me? but also who fucking cares about them? idk. it also sucks because i’m wearing my sophie sweater today and serving too much cunt for a corporate environment.

• i will never forgive the initial commodification of large language models by openai. its gonna take so much longer for ai research to be taken seriously by the general population.
• i deleted my twitter account about two years ago and while i’m eternally grateful for that decision, i’ve always been nervous that i’d be missing out on the inside jokes that make up most of internet culture. all that to say, thank god for those meme pages on instagram reposting tweets like i really needed someone to fill that vacuum of humor and they came through for me.
• i have a memory from elementary school where i was in my music class and playing with a sharpened pencil on the carpet. all i remember next is the pencil going through my left hand and blood leaking all over my uniform shirt. it seemed that no one helped fast enough as the blood dried on my skin with smudges from my tears i’m guessing? i still don’t know if that was a dream.
• time isn’t as close as i think it is. it’s like when i turn back i can’t see it anymore, i’m waving back to get its attention—i still feel the weigh over my shoulder.
• i’m gripping what i want so tightly i might kill it. i can see the life leaving its eyes and veins pop. but it’s for me. i know it’s for me.
• oliynykova’s serve is so cool, it looks too cool to be that consistent and fluid.
• i think ariana grande was allowed to co-opt black culture without too much blowback from the public since she was a child star on nickelodeon. to me at least, working with dan schneider under the age of 18 gives you one hall pass for a socially unacceptable behavior. i’m thinking about this since i’m a) a gay guy and b) listening to positions in a time of tumultuous transition.
• this tweet fr follows me everywhere:

• there has to be a drink with the same flavor profile as classic red bull like i can’t keep drinking caffeine like this if i want to retire in brazil.
• i find it so endearing that my barber sings along to the radio while he cuts my hair. he’s not shy with it either, finding harmonies with the melody and vocalizing the ad-libs with precision. i sometimes join him in between cuts obviously avoiding eye contact even though everyone knows the words to s&m…
• i’m actually so glad i don’t have a childhood home. i don’t think i can visit a space of mine that has witnessed so much change. my presence is inherently transient. i’ve gotten so attached to places i’ve only lived in for a couple months, college dorms mostly. i look back at the photos and can explain ever design choice, every poster placement, every pin on my wall.
• why do we need to ai-generate little latin boys with grammys if we have bad bunny performing at the super bowl?
• i don’t have my pulse on the culture like i used to but i hope bugonia is a frontrunner in the oscar conversation. (aside: i’ve heard so much about one battle after another [review below] and tbh i wasn’t as impressive as it was made out to be. coming into it i had this expectation that pta succinctly captured the climate of post-covid america in three hours and while he kinda did, it didn’t move me at all? that’s a pretty loaded statement and i probably need to write a full-blown essay about it but i digress…)

• i think gpt by stayc is the best songs on love in the internet age post-covid and that’s a hill i’m willing to die on. i’m also only sharing this opinion because i think i’m dl, but in a k-pop sort of way. (aside: i’ve been on the periphery of k-pop stan culture for most of my time on twitter and regularly found myself running in the same circles as people with irene avis. in a way i felt an kinship with them and i don’t think i have time to explain further.)
• the world has always been broken
• i feel like 2% of all air canada employees speak french fr
• are you predicting trends or just observing what’s already in front of you?
• whenever i drink a strawberry matcha i feel like a fruit fly drinking sugar water in a wet lab
• is media literacy really at an all time low if the only people seeing these takes are also concerned with anti-intellectualism? we only talk about these issues as outsiders looking in instead of actually interacting with the realistic opinions of the people who are “media illiterate.” it also doesn’t help that these conversations mainly happen online with media publications regurgitating the spark notes version of a video essay an editor found on youtube. i guarantee you most people don’t know who mina le is.
• there’s something about the personality of the average british person that makes the traitors uk the best in the franchise
• emerald fennell’s movies are gonna be cult classics in 30 years and yes i’m being dead serious
• rather than relying on gestures, we rely on diction and syntax
• we need more horny b-roll footage
• industry is one of the only shows that treats sex scenes as something that is used to explicitly help the narrative to make relationships more obvious to viewer without it teetering on “show, don’t tell.” it feels less intimate—more viscous and voyeuristic. it’s like i’m watching something too realistic to suspend my belief that i’m watching television.
• imagine if tennis had loser brackets… like imagine an unseeded player grinding through the draw after losing early and then having to reset the bracket against sinner in the final… like i’d kill myself.
• life constantly feels like you’re traversing fog of  war and unlocking previously restricted areas; somehow MOBAs are a useful metaphor.
• time builds fondness
• and of course this knocked me off my ass btw:

There are two cardinal rules of writing. First, you never say I’m trying to write a book, novel, short story, etc. Second, you never talk about what you’re writing in detail. Break these rules and you’ll never get anything done.

I don’t like talking about my upcoming projects because I always jinx myself. However, eventually I’m going to have to talk about them. And since I’ve been mostly consistent on posting on this blog, the momentum helped me bring back unfinished short stories out of the back burner.

I’ve stopped writing short stories for several years because I’ve been so busy. Now, I’m back in the game. I have a chance to finish my short story trilogy before the year is done.

Why now? I hate leaving anything unfinished. At this point in my life I don’t care if my works succeed or not. It’s all about just finishing. Best to be last in the finish line than to drop out completely. At least I can say to myself in the mirror that I did it.

Do you have any writing projects in your back burner? Do you want to finish them regardless if you succeed or not? Take advantage of 2026 before 2027 creeps up on you.

#writing #project #shortstory

New York, NY. #chairsz

Almighty and Everlasting God, Who hatest nothing that Thou hast made, and dost forgive the sins of all those who are penitent: Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we. worthily lamenting our sins, and acknowledging our wretchedness, may obtain of Thee, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ, Thy Son, our Lord, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee and the Holy Ghost, ever One God, world without end. Amen.

—Common Service Book of the Lutheran Church, 1917

#lent #prayers

This series begins with the post, Rules for Thee: The Homeowners Association Community Standards. Moving on to “Prohibited Items,” this is what it says for my HOA-governed neighborhood (emphasis mine):

Certain alterations/conditions are not allowed within the Declaration without the written approval of the Board as submitted by the ACC. These include, but are not limited to those listed below. They are considered to be in VIOLATION and subject to immediate action by the ACC through the Violation Procedures as amended from time to time.

•Window Air Conditioning Units

•Satellite Dishes over 39.37 in.

•Aluminum, metal, plastic, or fiberglass roofs where the roof pitch is equal to or greater than 3/12 unless covered by composite asphalt/fiberglass multi-tab or dimensional shingles.

•Wood or asphalt mineral surface roll roofs

•Plastic or Artificial flowers.

The first major problem I had in my new house was the a/c. Within two or three years, it needed new coils because mine were freezing up and the type I had was outdated and no longer on the market. WTF! Next, I needed a new fan motor because mine burned out. That was between year three and four. By year five or six, the a/c was irreparable, and the cost for replacement was $9k!!! Thankfully, it went out in the “fall” or I probably would have died.

So, for a year or so, I had one a/c window unit in the back. Next, I added another to the front. Then, I added a portable one that had a part you had to put to the window, but it didn’t hang out the window. It was hot AF in this house! I gathered a fraction of the money then applied for a bank loan to finance a new unit.

I wrote all that to say not one time did the HOA say anything. There were other “violators” in the neighborhood. And I actually didn’t know it was against “Community Standards” until a gracious informant clued me in. Plus, I have definitely seen artificial flowers. Do you really think homeowners are asking for permission from the “Architecture Committee” for box air conditioners and fake ass flowers?

When you closed on your house located in an HOA-governed community, you agreed to things that you may not have imagined. Yes, you as a grown person—who likely made the largest purchase of your lifetime—signed up to have an abundance of rules for a property you thought you owned. These rules exist to create homogeneity for the betterment of the community, aka “to increase property values…or at least that’s what they continue to tell you. Look at the verbiage HOAs use (emphasis mine):

It is the intention of the ACC to maintain a high standard of exterior architectural appearance throughout the Vista Palms Community. The following guidelines have been set up to protect the integrity of the community for both the developer’s interests and the purchasers’ investment therein. Your adherence to these guidelines will help preserve the quality of Vista Palms.

However, if you have come to understand how rules work, rules are not for everyone. And they are often enforced arbitrarily. You can see this by driving through a community. But you will not truly know unless you know someone who the HOA has made an example of. Thankfully, I will demonstrate this through a review of my neighborhood in a series of posts, beginning with this one.

My HOA Community Standards document informs homeowners upfront that they don’t mean everything that they say. And even if they don’t say something, it may still apply to you (emphasis mine):

This Community Standards Document is established to assist the Architectural Control Committee (ACC) and Owners with procedures and guidelines through consistent and high quality design standards for the property alteration process. It supports and amplifies the Declaration of Restrictions and Covenants and other governing documents that bind each property Owner. It is provided to residents of Vista Palms for their future reference. This document is not intended to address all possible situations, alterations, etc…These standards do not cover every possible situation that may require ACC approval.

So, what does the Architectural Committee have jurisdiction over? Well, everything related to the outside of your house and the surrounding land as follows (emphasis mine):

Any exterior property alteration (to the home or the lot) requires the completion of an “Application to Architectural Control Committee” form that must be approved by the ACC. A copy of a blank application form is included in this booklet.

Examples of alterations include, but are not limited to:

•Awnings

•Brick pavers: location and color

•Changes to the exterior color of the home (painting)

•Exterior decoration applied above garage doors and fronts of homes

•Recreational or sporting equipment

•Fences

•Flag poles and antennas

•Front door: style and/or color

•Gutters: style, color

•Items in flowerbed besides plants

•Lanais, sunrooms and gazebos

•Lighting: placement and size

•Landscaping (refer to Article 4)

•Pools, spas, hot tubs, whirlpools

•Porches, decks and patios

•Roofing

•Screen Enclosures

•Home additions and exterior renovations

You bought/financed a house so that you could apply to your HOA to determine if you can make any changes to your house. Does that sound like something you own?

I imagine this scenario below to make myself laugh even though it isn’t the greatest analogy [because the car doesn’t stay on the lot in one community].

You buy a Ford Expedition. You decide you want change the color of the car from black to blue but you have to apply to the Ford Architectural Committee (FAC) first. They say yes because blue is safer than black (Why did they sell you a black car then?). But it has to be sky blue because it has to match the current fleet of Ford Expeditions. Your a/c stops functioning and so you leave the windows down all the time. The FAC tells you that you cannot have those windows down like that and they are going to fine you $1000. (They don’t have to do to this. They want to do this.) You are confused because there are other Fords drivers with their windows down but, apparently, they only have their windows down at night. A/C repair is $800 which you obviously do not have right now because, duh, why would you be having your windows down while it is 106 degrees outside. There are two nails in your left passenger tire and you get one used tire to replace it. The FAC sends you a notice that you aren’t allow to have mismatched tires on your Expedition because that doesn’t represent the “high standard” of the brand. But you don’t need four new tires plus you don’t have the money to replace them all in addition to needing a new $800 a/c and having to pay the $1k fine for having your windows down all day for the past few months. You play your music loud in your Expedition’s upgraded sound system while you try to come up with a plan for all your expenses. The FAC sends you a violation stating that the volume of your music is unacceptable for a person who drives a Ford Expedition and you will be fined $1000. You now have the money to get all new tires and to get the a/c fixed. You receive a notice from Ford Law Firm that your case has been referred to them and that you owe fines and attorney’s fees for multiple violations and if you don’t pay, they will take you to court to get a lien and/or take the car from you to sell it. But you own the it. What? At least you can just sell the Expedition because it has a value higher than other brands…except that people are now buying much older cars because they realized that there is better value in those. Plus, there are so many other Expedition-type vehicles on the market that are cheaper than yours and with similar features. Also, sky blue is like, so senior-citizen.

Because I have something like 400 books stored in Houston, a few of which I'd like to bring back to Cairo with me, I decided to travel without a book on my person, and that way I'd have one less book to carry. Instead, I grabbed my kindle—which I hadn't touched in over a year—to start diving into whatever unread book(s) I might have on it. Walter Mosely's ARCHIBALD LAWLESS, ANARCHIST AT LARGE has thus far not disappointed. Apparently, you can hardly ever go wrong with me if the book prominently features a character that tethers between genius and madness.

Enjoyed watching BUGONIA on the long leg from Paris, though its title does strike me as a little forced. I also watched the Francois Ozon film adaptation of Albert Camus' THE STRANGER, which was surprisingly good. Surprising only because the book itself is rather peculiar and doesn't quite lend itself too well to movies, but the black & white cinematography alone is just gorgeous, and all the performances are very on point.

The weather in Houston this time of year is both warm and crisp, and much more pleasant than Cairo right now which has yet to fully shed its winter chill, despite Khamaseen dust storms having just rolled in early this year—typically a sign of incoming spring.

The AirBnB I'm staying at is just around the corner from my kid's place, his school sandwiched in-between. Got to walk him to school this morning, which was just absolutely delightful.

#journal #travel

I’ve been playing Marvel SNAP for close to three years. If you’re not familiar, Marvel SNAP is a card battling video game where you play cards with Marvel superheroes and villains, each of which has a point value and most of which have abilities that affect the game.

Games usually take about five minutes, so it’s a really good casual game to play on your phone. You can win without spending a ton of money, and the developers seem to really put a lot of effort into keeping the game competitive.

….and, I think it’s going to die.

Because Marvel SNAP depends on players spending money to get cool variants (the same card you already have, but with a different picture) or entirely new cards. They launch a new set of cards every four or five weeks. They call these “seasons,” and if you pay ten bucks for a season, you’re guaranteed to get some new cards.

So the primary way this game makes money is by getting players to pay money for new cards. Which presents a problem: the business model demands infinite growth, but neither the IP nor the game design will support that.

Every recognizable Marvel character already has a card. So if part of the fun of the game for you is playing cards that feature your favorite characters, you know at this point that you’re never seeing any more.

They’re starting to do new versions of old characters with slightly different abilities. So right now, for example, they’ve got Star Lord: Master of the Sun, which a) makes me start singing “Dayman” in my head and b) is the third Star Lord card they’ve released. But even as they release new cards for old characters, they’re trying to give them new abilities, but the game is simple enough that most of the good abilities have already been assigned to a card, so the card descriptions are getting longer and more intricate which directly contrasts with the simplicity of the gameplay.

The motivations for getting a new card boil down to either “this unlocks a new way to play the game” or “this strengthens my existing strategy.” There was a bit of buzz when the Marvel Zombies dropped in October, satisfying the former motivation, but nothing really essential for the second motivation.

What this means is that since October of ‘25, nobody’s had a whole lot of motivation to get new cards. And it doesn’t look like the situation is going to get any better. It used to be that they’d launch a new card and people who had that card would mop the floor with you, and you’d have to get that card or a reasonable defense for it in order to stay competitive. That’s just not the case anymore.

Which is fine! It’s still a fun game! I could happily play with just these cards more or less forever! But since the business model depends on endless growth, I think we’ve reached a crisis point.

So it’s basically a microcosm of capitalism, is what I’m saying. Trying to milk endless growth out of finite resources is a fool’s errand, and capitalism as a whole seems to be at the same place as Marvel Snap. They keep trying to convince us that we need some new thing, or that the next consumer revolution is upon us, but they haven’t introduced anything that’s a real game changer since the smartphone in ‘08.

Whereas it used to seem like the breakneck pace of advancement would never let up, there are now legal adults who’ve grown up wihout any really significant advances in technology. (Yes, I am aware of the AI “revolution” but remain unconvinced that it’s a real thing anymore than the blockchain “revolution” was. Just because a lot of credulous dopes have invested money into something doesn’t mean it’s got real value.)

The frustrating thing is that everybody knows this. Nothing grows forever, especially nothing that’s built on resources that can’t grow forever. So maybe it’s time we stop pretending that endless growth is a real thing.

Quando si lavora alla costruzione di un curricolo nazionale per la prima infanzia nei Balcani, si ha spesso l’impressione di muoversi in un territorio apparentemente tecnico, fatto di indicatori, standard, descrittori di competenza. Ma sotto questa superficie si agitano forze molto più profonde: identità collettive in trasformazione, eredità storiche che non smettono di pesare, aspirazioni europee che chiedono di essere tradotte in pratiche quotidiane. È in questo spazio, dove la pedagogia incontra la geopolitica culturale, che il pensiero di Kwasi Wiredu diventa sorprendentemente rilevante. Non perché offra soluzioni preconfezionate, ma perché illumina un nodo cruciale: ogni società, quando riforma la propria educazione, sta in realtà ridefinendo se stessa.

Wiredu parte da un’idea semplice e radicale: non esistono concetti neutrali. Ogni parola porta con sé un mondo, e ogni traduzione è un atto politico. È un’intuizione che nei Balcani si percepisce con forza. Termini come agency, holistic development, participation arrivano da organismi internazionali con un’aura di universalità, ma quando entrano nelle lingue locali si trasformano, si piegano, talvolta si svuotano. Non perché manchi la volontà di comprenderli, ma perché ogni lingua custodisce una propria visione dell’infanzia, della comunità, del ruolo dell’adulto.

Wiredu ci invita a non subire questo processo, ma a governarlo. Non basta importare concetti: occorre ricostruirli dall’interno, farli risuonare con le categorie culturali locali, evitare che diventino slogan tecnici privi di radicamento. È un lavoro che nei Balcani assume un valore particolare, perché qui la lingua non è solo uno strumento comunicativo: è un marcatore identitario, un terreno di memoria, talvolta un confine politico. Progettare un curricolo significa allora anche decidere quali parole meritano di entrare nel lessico educativo nazionale e quali invece rischiano di imporre visioni estranee.

 

Uno dei contributi più originali di Wiredu è la sua capacità di tenere insieme universalismo e particolarismo senza farli collidere. Egli sostiene che gli esseri umani condividono una base comune, biologica e cognitiva, che rende possibile il dialogo interculturale. Ma questa base non cancella le differenze: le rende intelligibili. È un equilibrio che descrive perfettamente la condizione dei sistemi educativi balcanici, sospesi tra l’esigenza di allinearsi agli standard europei e il bisogno di preservare la propria specificità culturale.

In questo senso, i curricoli non sono semplici strumenti tecnici: sono dichiarazioni di appartenenza. Aderire agli standard internazionali significa affermare una direzione politica; valorizzare le tradizioni locali significa rivendicare una continuità storica. Wiredu ci ricorda che non si tratta di scegliere tra i due poli, ma di costruire un ponte credibile. Gli universali non sono un’imposizione, ma un terreno comune; i particolari non sono un ostacolo, ma la forma concreta attraverso cui ogni società interpreta quei principi.

 

Wiredu non separa mai la filosofia dalla politica. Per lui, pensare significa intervenire nella realtà, soprattutto in contesti segnati da eredità coloniali o post‑imperiali. Nei Balcani, questa prospettiva è particolarmente pertinente. La scuola dell’infanzia è uno dei pochi spazi in cui le società possono immaginare un futuro diverso da quello ereditato. È qui che si costruiscono le prime forme di convivenza, si negoziano le differenze linguistiche, si sperimentano modelli di partecipazione che possono influenzare la vita civica.

La democrazia consensuale evocata da Wiredu, fondata sulla ricerca di accordi e sulla centralità della comunità, offre una chiave di lettura interessante per i contesti balcanici, dove la frammentazione etnica e linguistica ha spesso ostacolato la costruzione di politiche condivise. Un curricolo che valorizza la partecipazione delle famiglie, la pluralità culturale e la cooperazione tra educatori non è solo un documento pedagogico: è un gesto politico che mira a ricucire il tessuto sociale.

 

Il metodo di Wiredu, che unisce rigore concettuale, attenzione alle pratiche culturali e pragmatismo, si presta sorprendentemente bene al lavoro curricolare nei Balcani. Significa analizzare con precisione i riferimenti internazionali, ma senza assumerli come dogmi. Significa osservare le pratiche educative locali, non per idealizzarle, ma per comprenderne la logica interna. Significa costruire un quadro coerente che sia allo stesso tempo fedele alle aspirazioni europee e rispettoso delle identità locali.

In questa prospettiva, il lavoro curricolare diventa un esercizio di decolonizzazione concettuale nel senso più alto del termine: non un rifiuto dell’esterno, ma un uso critico e creativo delle influenze globali per costruire un modello educativo autentico, credibile e sostenibile. È un processo che richiede tempo, ascolto e capacità di mediazione, ma che può produrre risultati profondi e duraturi.

Il pensiero di Kwasi Wiredu offre una lente potente per comprendere ciò che accade quando un Paese riforma il proprio curricolo della prima infanzia. Non si tratta solo di definire competenze o descrivere pratiche: si tratta di decidere chi si vuole diventare come comunità. Nei Balcani, questa scelta è particolarmente carica di significato, perché riguarda società che stanno ancora ridefinendo la propria identità dopo decenni di trasformazioni politiche e culturali.

Integrare la prospettiva di Wiredu significa riconoscere che ogni curricolo è un atto di sovranità culturale, un modo per affermare una visione del mondo e del futuro. Significa costruire un’educazione capace di dialogare con l’Europa senza rinunciare alla propria storia, e capace di valorizzare le culture locali senza chiudersi in esse. È un equilibrio difficile, ma è proprio in questa difficoltà che si misura la maturità di un sistema educativo.

 

Go Dawgs!

My early game to follow tonight comes from the Big Eight Conference and will have the Butler Bulldogs men's basketball team playing against the Georgetown Hoyas. Start time is scheduled for 5:30 PM CT.

And the adventure continues.

Our Father Who art in heaven Hallowed be Thy name Thy Kingdom come Thy will be done on Earth as it is in heaven Give us this day our daily Bread And forgive us our trespasses As we forgive those who trespass against us And lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil

Amen

Jesus is Lord! Come Lord Jesus!

Come Lord Jesus! Christ is Lord!

The Victory of Ukraine

For days beseen in Heav’ Litany if Ghosts in fear Justice in Water And small pens The rhythm of daily wonder Effects to the late in May Fallen years and days.. And the months we sceptre Iranian blues by the lift Salmon in wonder of the Navy Pressing by the dew And skips of the Ron for water’s end In peers we knew the end Small wonder for wars that would Like this one, and the news we thought Blasting to corridors And courage to connect the one Not freely, but in temper And just in spirit- To go alone For Victory this alias And a sky of wonder to know Same time as the Deity- Our Father in Heaven Who put us first In fearless wonder And the day gave way Making Bread as hand in hand The four shots we heard that day And we knew of Absolom- and the meek and wonder To be old and powder’s due This symphony of a hangman’s dirge Calling collective to the Royal A page in view, And offering to collect A fortune’s path- but we were there, in toe The ecstasy of charting In due course change our plan And noticed charge Victory is ours And Home For the better day As we wait.

質問が止まらないほど相手に関心がある、という気持ちに憧れがある。 それとは逆に、能動文だけで会話する、というカッコよさを同時に思いつく。 持っていないものはすべて、遠くから見ると美しく見える。

その思いを文字にしたとき、前半はうまくいったと思った。 確かに、頭の中で輝いていた部分が、そのまま紙の上に落ちてきたように見えた。 ところが後半に「かっこいい」という言葉を置いた途端、すべてが安くなる。 光沢のあった表面に、急に指紋がつくような濁りを感じる。 頭の中にあるうちは、確かにそれはダイヤのようだったのに、文字にしてしまうと、「ああ、君はそんな子だったのね」とガッカリしながら自分が産んだ言葉をそれでも愛す。

両手で物を持つという行為が好き。

花瓶を両手で持つ。 スマートフォンを両手で持つ。 お茶碗を両手で持つ。

両手で持つという、その仕草自体が好きで、何でも頭の中で両手に持たせてみる。 普段は片手で済ませているものを、わざわざ両手に移すと、急にそれが大切なものに変わる。

普段両手で持たないものも持ってみる。 箸を両手で持つ。 コンビニの帰りの袋を両手で持つ。 一円玉を両手で持つ。

両手で持つと、片手で持つより、重みを持つ。

物語にあまり関心がない。 起こっている事象そのものが好きだ。 もし、ストーリーよりも事象の連なりを見せることだけを目的に映画を作る監督がいたとしたら、俺は「おやおや」と思うだろう。 その言葉は、軽く押し隠した羨ましさが隠れている。

嫌いなことを続けると、体が熱くなる。 顔の表面に脂が浮いてくるのが分かる。 内側で何かが燃えているというより、ただ外側が溶けていく感じがする。

ゴミ袋がある。 誰かが捨てた。

自転車がある。 誰かが置いた。

ショッピングモールがある。 誰かが建てた。

誰かに伝えようとすると、説明が必要になり、受け手は少し困る。 だが、もし困っていない人がいたとすると、その状態には名前があったら良かったのに。

日々とても辛い。 そして、辛いことを辛いと思わないようにするのは、とても醜い。 今日も、俺は赤色と金色が好きだと思う。

It is the future, and Nanofactories have removed material scarcity. No one misses out on their material needs. So why do we still have power structures?

There has been an assumption that power relationships arise from unequal access to resources. One historical perspective argues that if a boss has power over an employee, it is because the boss has access to greater capital resources. If the same employee had access to an equal amount of capital, it is assumed they would leave and start their own business, where they have full control.

Now that everyone can freely print capital using Nanofactories, the above perspective leads to the assumption that companies will now collapse. Sure, we've seen this start to occur in certain fields (e.g. financial, middle-management, supply chain, etc), but why is it not more widespread? Surely no one would choose to continue working under a company structure when they don’t have to.

There appear to be other reasons that people stay at organizations, even if they no longer need to. For most of human history, it was assumed that people worked for survival as the primary reason. However, on a second look, we can see widespread examples of people working to earn far beyond the need for basic sustenance: taking pay cuts, volunteering, open-source development, managing community groups – just to name a few examples.

Even our distant ancestors lived in small nomadic communities, worked less hours than most current jobs, and this was enough for survival. If that survival-capital was the end of human want, there would be no need for cities to develop. Thousands of years (and several automation breakthroughs) later, material-shaping artisans gradually became information and financial workers. People continued to commit themselves to more and more complex structures of power and coordination.

When we look beyond the material necessities, we see it is social power and social influence that is gained by being part of an organized effort. We tend to achieve far more for our fellows when we do it as a community effort. If humans were content having no influence over their peers, then today we would be seeing society dissolve as people journey off in their own directions. That may be the “true path” for some, but for most others, meaning comes from living a life in service of the larger society.

Today, we no longer need each other to survive. We can print everything we need. Despite this, many of us choose to work together as organizations, requiring compromise and personal sacrifice. We choose this, because it is the way to support the thriving of the rest of humanity, and not just our own survival. And so jobs shouldn’t ever be expected to vanish via technological breakthrough.

La afición me idolatra, como lo hicieron sus abuelos con Pelé o sus padres con Ronaldo Nazario.

No tanto, pero es suficiente; se suben cuando toco el balón en medio de la adversidad y voy para arriba. Si sale bien, qué más pedir, no encuentro nada más sublime.

Crecí en un barrio donde los niños resuelven la vida a las buenas o a puñetazos. A ninguno se le ocurre dejar el devenir para mañana. Es ahora: nada se aplaza. Nadie sabe si estará vivo la semana entrante.

Un día mi tío Jair, que jugó en el Botafogo, me dijo:

-Tú sirves para portero.

Y me entrenó. Comprendí el punto clave: el valor. Robar la bola de los pies al atacante, cabeza fría en el penalti, volar entre los palos. Aunque te partas los dientes.

Más tarde faltó uno y me pusieron de atacante. A continuación, ya saben.

Porque el secreto es que huelo el miedo, el miedo es el agujero. El miedo del defensor lo desequilibra. El miedo del portero es un segundo tarde. Parece pereza, negligencia. Pero es miedo espeso que inmoviliza porque está en las tripas.

Me empujan, me escupen, me insultan, me patean. No hay miedo. Y llevo el balón. Lo que gritan en las gradas es eso, no hay más.

Vencer. El miedo que nos drena. Que nos impide vivir con dignidad.

Es la fiesta.

La cancha es la vida. La vida es la cancha.

Meta has been quietly building something significant. Most marketers haven’t fully grasped the importance because it has been wrapped in machine learning jargon and engineering blog posts.

The Generative Ads Recommendation Model, which Meta calls GEM, is the largest foundation model ever built specifically for advertising recommendation. It’s live across every major surface on Facebook and Instagram, and the Q4 2025 numbers, a 3.5% increase in clicks on Facebook, more than 1% lift in conversions on Instagram, are worth paying attention to at Meta’s scale.

Eric Seufert recently published a deep technical breakdown of GEM drawing on Meta’s own whitepapers, a podcast interview with Meta’s VP of Monetization Infrastructure Matt Steiner, and the company’s earnings calls. His analysis is the most detailed public account of how these systems actually work, and what follows draws heavily on it. I’d recommend reading his piece in full, because Meta has been deliberately vague about the internals, and Seufert has done the work of triangulating across sparse sources to build a coherent picture.

That sparseness is worth mentioning upfront. Meta has strong commercial reasons to keep the details thin. What we’re working with is a combination of carefully worded whitepapers, earnings call quotes from executives who are choosing their words, and one arXiv paper that may or may not describe GEM’s actual production architecture. I think the picture that emerges is convincing. But we should be honest about the fact that we’re reading between lines Meta drew deliberately.

The retrieval/ranking split

If you’re going to understand what GEM changes, you need to grasp the two-stage model Meta uses to select ads. Seufert explains this well: first ad retrieval, then ad ranking. These are different problems with different systems and different computational constraints.

Retrieval is Andromeda’s job (publicly named December 2024). It takes the vast pool of ads you could theoretically see (potentially millions) and filters to a shortlist of tens or hundreds. This has to be fast and cheap, so the model runs lighter predictions on each candidate. Think of it as triage.

Ranking is where GEM operates. It takes that shortlist and predicts which ad is most likely to produce a commercial result: a click, a purchase, a signup. The ranking model is higher-capacity but processes far fewer candidates, and the whole thing has to complete in milliseconds. Retrieval casts the net; ranking picks the fish.

When Meta reports GEM performance gains, they’re talking about this second stage getting more precise. The system isn’t finding more potential customers, it’s getting better at predicting which ad, shown to which person, at which moment, will convert.

The retrieval/ranking distinction is coveted in more depth in Bidding-Aware Retrieval, a paper by Alibaba researchers that attempts to align the often upper-funnel predictions made during retrieval with the lower-funnel orientation of ranking while accommodating different bidding strategies.

Sequence learning: why this architecture is different

Here’s where it gets interesting, and where I think the implications for how you run campaigns start to bite.

Previous ranking models used what Meta internally calls “legacy human-engineered sparse features.” An analyst would decide which signals mattered, past ad interactions, page visits, demographic attributes. They’d aggregate them into feature vectors and feed them to the model. Meta’s own sequence learning paper admits this approach loses sequential information and leans too heavily on human intuition about what matters.

GEM replaces that with event sequence learning. Instead of pre-digested feature sets, it ingests raw sequences of user events and learns from their ordering and combination. Meta’s VP of Monetization Infrastructure put it this way: the model moves beyond independent probability estimates toward understanding conversion journeys. You’ve browsed cycling gear, clicked on gardening shears, looked at toddler toys. Those three events in that sequence change the prediction about what you’ll buy next.

The analogy Meta keeps reaching for is language models predicting the next word in a sentence, except here the “sentence” is your behavioural history and the “next word” is your next commercial action. People who book a hotel in Hawaii tend to convert on sunglasses, swimsuits, snorkel gear. The sequence is the signal. Individual events, stripped of their ordering, lose most of that information.

This matters because it means GEM sees your potential customers at a resolution previous systems couldn’t reach. It’s predicting based on where someone sits in a behavioural trajectory, not just who they are demographically or what they clicked last Tuesday. For products that fit within recognisable purchase journeys, this should translate directly into better conversion prediction and fewer wasted impressions.

But I want to highlight something Seufert’s analysis makes clear: we don’t know exactly how granular these sequences are in practice, or how long the histories GEM actually ingests at serving time. The GEM whitepaper says “up to thousands of events,” but there’s a meaningful gap between what a model can process in training and what it processes under millisecond latency constraints in production.

How they solve the latency problem

This is the engineering puzzle at the centre of the whole thing. Rich behavioural histories make better predictions, but you can’t crunch thousands of events in the milliseconds available before an ad slot needs filling.

Seufert’s analysis draws on a Meta paper describing LLaTTE (LLM-Style Latent Transformers for Temporal Events) that appears to address exactly this tension, though Meta hasn’t confirmed it’s the architecture powering GEM in production.

The solution is a two-stage split. A heavy upstream model runs asynchronously whenever new high-intent events arrive (like a conversion). It processes the user’s extended event history, potentially thousands of events, and caches the result as an embedding. This model doesn’t know anything about specific ad candidates. It’s building a compressed representation of who this user is and what their behavioural trajectory looks like.

Then a lightweight downstream model runs in real time at ad-serving. It combines that cached user embedding with short recent event sequences and the actual ad candidates under consideration. The upstream model consumes more than 45x the sequence FLOPs of the online model. That asymmetry is the whole trick, you amortise the expensive computation across time, then make the cheap real-time decision against a rich precomputed context.

One detail from Seufert’s breakdown that I keep coming back to: the LLaTTE paper found that including content embeddings from fine-tuned LLaMA models, semantic representations of each event, was a prerequisite for “bending the scaling curve.” Without those embeddings, throwing more compute and longer sequences at the model doesn’t produce predictable gains. With them, it does. That’s a specific and testable claim about what makes the architecture work, and it’s one of the few pieces of genuine technical disclosure in the public record.

The scaling law question

This is where I think the commercial story gets properly interesting, and also where I’d encourage some healthy scepticism.

Meta’s GEM whitepaper and the LLaTTE paper both reference Wukong, a separate Meta paper attempting to establish a scaling law for recommendation systems analogous to what we’ve observed in LLMs. In language models, there’s a predictable relationship between compute invested and capability gained. More resources reliably produce better results. If the same holds for ad recommendation, then GEM’s current performance is early on a curve with a lot of headroom.

Meta’s leadership is betting heavily that it does hold. On their most recent earnings call, they said they doubled the GPU cluster used to train GEM in Q4. The 2026 plan is to scale to an even larger cluster, increase model complexity, expand training data, deploy new sequence learning architectures. The specific quote that should get your attention is “This is the first time we have found a recommendation model architecture that can scale with similar efficiency as LLMs.”

The whitepaper claims a 23x increase in effective training FLOPs. The CFO described GEM as twice as efficient at converting compute into ad performance compared to previous ranking models.

Now, the sceptic’s reading. Meta is a company that spent $46 billion on capex in 2024 and needs to justify continued spending at that pace. Claiming their ad recommendation models follow LLM-like scaling laws is convenient because it turns massive GPU expenditure into a story about predictable returns. I’m not saying the claim is wrong, the Q4 numbers suggest something real is happening, but we should notice that this is also the story Meta needs to tell investors right now. The performance numbers are self-reported and the scaling claims are mostly untestable from outside.

That said, the quarter-over-quarter pattern is hard to dismiss. Meta first highlighted GEM, Lattice, and Andromeda together in a March 2025 blog post, and Seufert describes the cumulative effect of all three as a “consistent drumbeat of 5-10% performance improvements” across multiple quarters. No single quarter looks revolutionary, but they compound. And the extension of GEM to all major surfaces (including Facebook Reels in Q4) means those gains now apply everywhere you’re buying Meta inventory, not just on selected placements.

The creative volume angle

There’s a second dimension here that connects to where ad production is heading. Meta’s CFO explicitly linked GEM’s architecture to the expected explosion in creative volume as generative AI tools produce more ad variants. The system’s efficiency at handling large data volumes will be “beneficial in handling the expected growth in ad creative.”

This is the convergence I think experienced marketers should be watching most closely. More creative variants per advertiser means more candidates per impression for the ranking system to evaluate. An architecture that gets more efficient with scale, rather than choking on it, turns higher creative volume from a cost problem into a performance advantage. Seufert explores this theme further in The creative flood and the ad testing trap.

If you’re producing five ad variants today, producing fifty becomes a different proposition when the ranking system can actually learn from and differentiate between those variants at speed. The advertisers who benefit most from GEM’s improvements will be those feeding it more creative options, not those running the same three assets on rotation.

What this means for how you spend

I’m not going to pretend these architectural details should change your Monday morning. But a few things follow from them that are worth sitting with.

GEM’s purpose is to outperform human intuition at predicting conversions from behavioural sequences. If you’re still running heavy audience targeting with rigid constraints, you’re limiting the data the system can learn from. Broad targeting with strong creative has been the winning approach on Meta for a while. GEM widens that gap.

The bottleneck is shifting from targeting precision to creative supply. As the ranking model gets better at matching specific creative to specific users in specific behavioural moments, the constraint becomes whether you’re giving it enough material to work with.

Your measurement windows probably also need revisiting. If GEM is learning from extended behavioural sequences, attribution models that only look at last-touch or short windows will undercount Meta’s contribution to conversions that unfold over days or weeks.

And watch the earnings calls. The 2026 roadmap (larger training clusters, expanded data, new sequence architectures, improved knowledge distillation to runtime models) suggests we’re in the early phase. If the scaling law holds (and that’s a real if, not a rhetorical one), the gap between platforms running this kind of architecture and those that aren’t will widen.

Meta is rebuilding its ad infrastructure around a small number of very large foundation models, GEM, Andromeda, and Lattice, that learn from behavioural sequences rather than hand-picked features.

The results so far are impressive. Whether the scaling story plays out as cleanly as Meta’s investor narrative suggests is genuinely uncertain. But for marketers running at scale on Meta, the platform is getting measurably better at the thing you’re paying it to do, and the trajectory of improvement appears to have more room than previous architectures allowed.