The Avatar's Research: The Evidence's Sources

The current clients' study. The best clients analyzed: the sessions' types, the budgets paid, the referrals' sources, the satisfaction's patterns — the photographer's best clients' common threads identified. The past clients interviewed: why they chose, what they feared, what delighted — the research's gold from the relationships that exist.

The market's language harvested. The target clients' own words collected: the reviews of the competitors, the community groups' posts, the forums' and the socials' conversations — the audience's vocabulary for their occasions, their anxieties, and their desires documented verbatim. The avatar's language is the marketing's raw material.

The competitors' clients observed. The market's competitors' positioning and their reviews studied: the clients' praises and complaints — the market's satisfaction gaps and the differentiation's openings identified.

The Avatar's Construction: The Profile's Components

The demographics' and the psychographics' layers. The avatar's profile built in two layers: the demographics (the age, the location, the income, the family's structure) and the psychographics (the values, the anxieties, the aspirations, the buying's triggers) — the psychographics being the marketing's real target.

The journey's mapping. The avatar's path to the booking documented: the trigger's moment (the engagement, the pregnancy, the milestone), the research's behavior (where they look, what they compare), the objections' list, the decision's criteria. The journey's map is the marketing's placement's and messaging's guide.

The avatar's one-page profile. The research distilled into the working profile: the avatar's name, the occasion, the budget, the anxieties, the desires, the objections, the decision's criteria — the one-page profile that the marketing's every decision references.

The Marketing's Application: The Avatar in Action

The messaging's mirroring. The website's and the socials' copy speaking the avatar's language: the anxieties addressed, the desires reflected, the objections pre-answered. The avatar's profile testing every marketing decision: “would the avatar say it this way?”

The offers' alignment. The packages and the pricing designed per the avatar's budget and values: the avatar's buying behavior informing the session's structure, the deliverables, and the price's placement.

The channels' selection. The avatar's channels prioritized: the marketing's effort placed where the avatar actually researches and scrolls — the avatar's journey map directing the channels' investment.

The Avatar's Evolution: The Profile's Maintenance

The avatar's annual review. The avatar's profile revisited annually: the clients' evolution, the market's shifts, the niche's changes — the avatar's profile updated per the evidence. The business's growth often reveals the second avatar — the expansion's decision made deliberately.

The avatar's discipline honored: the marketing's decisions resisted when they serve the non-avatar's requests — the niche's discipline that the specialization's pricing requires, the wrong clients' referrals handled gracefully.

Conclusion

The client avatar is the photographer's marketing's target: the research from the current clients, the market's language, and the competitors' gaps; the profile built in the demographics and the psychographics; the journey mapped from the trigger to the decision; the marketing's messaging, offers, and channels tested against the avatar's profile — and the avatar evolved annually as the business grows. The avatar-building worksheets and the research guides are supported by the tools compared at AI image editor free. The avatar is the marketing's target — speak to the one and the ones like them will hear.

FAQ

What is a client avatar and why do photographers need one? The specific client's profile — the demographics, the psychographics, the journey, the objections — built from the research of the current clients and the market. The avatar makes the marketing speak to the one, and the ones like them hear it clearly.

How do photographers research their ideal clients? The current clients' study (the interviews, the patterns of the best sessions), the market's language harvesting (the reviews, the groups, the communities), and the competitors' clients' observation — the research's three sources building the avatar's evidence-based profile.

How often should photographers update their client avatar? Annually at minimum: the clients' evolution, the market's shifts, and the business's growth revealing the avatar's changes — the profile updated per the evidence, the second avatar's emergence considered as the business expands.

The Five-Item Pass Checklist

The preparation that covers nearly every failure category. Item one — the check-engine light must be off, and stay off: an illuminated light is an automatic fail in every program, and so is a recently-cleared light with incomplete readiness monitors (the system needs to re-verify itself through driving). If the light is on, get the code read free at any parts store, fix the underlying cause, and drive — the light's absence plus completed monitors is the test's first gate. Item two — the readiness monitors must be complete: after any battery disconnect, jump-start, or code clear, your car's self-tests reset and need 50-100 miles of mixed driving (cold starts, city stops, highway cruise) to re-complete — testing before they do fails as “not ready” regardless of your car's health. Item three — the paperwork: registration or renewal notice, and payment — arriving without the renewal notice is the classic second-trip generator. Item four — the warm engine: a fifteen-minute drive before the test puts every sensor at operating condition — the state the measurements assume. Item five — the basics of mechanical health: fresh oil, a sealing gas cap, no obvious exhaust leaks — the ten-dollar items whose absence produces the marginal fails.

The Week-Before and Day-Of Sequence

The preparation arranged in time. The week before: address the check-engine light if lit (diagnosis now, not at the station); complete the drive cycle if the battery was touched (a week of normal commuting does it); check the gas cap's seal and the oil's level; and pick the station from the official locator with the retest policy asked by phone. The night before: confirm the paperwork location, glance at the tires (some programs' safety-related checks care), and plan a morning drive rather than a cold-start arrival. The day of: the fifteen-minute warm-up drive, mid-morning arrival (the queue's quiet slot), paperwork in hand — and the test itself takes minutes: the scanner connects, the monitors report, the verdict prints. After a pass: the certificate transmits electronically in most programs — the renewal proceeds, and the checklist retires for another year. The whole sequence costs a week of ordinary driving and ten minutes of attention; the unprepared version costs retests and deadlines.

The Texas Example: The Rules in Action

The checklist applied where the 2025 changes concentrated it. In the seventeen Texas emissions counties — the Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Austin, and El Paso metros — the annual emissions inspection survives the safety inspection's elimination, and every checklist item applies exactly: the OBD-based test reads the monitors, the check-engine light fails automatically, the readiness rules follow the universal pattern, and the new-vehicle exemption gives recent purchases a calendar pass. Texas adds its own specific texture: the inspection stations are licensed private businesses (the locator on the state's program pages lists them), the fee runs roughly $18-40 by county, and the registration ties the whole cycle together. The general lesson the Texas case illustrates: emissions programs everywhere read the same signals — monitors, lights, seals — so the pass checklist travels intact across every state that tests.

Conclusion

What you need to pass an emissions test is a checklist, not luck: a dark check-engine light over completed readiness monitors, the paperwork, a warm engine, and the ten-dollar basics — sequenced across the week before (diagnosis, drive cycle, gas cap) and the day of (warm-up drive, quiet-hour arrival). The test reads your car's own honest self-diagnosis; the preparation makes the diagnosis worth reading. The Texas emissions counties' specific rules — and every other testing state's — are collected in this Texas emissions inspection guide, and the same inspection resource covers the fail-and-retest path for the cars that find out the hard way.

FAQ

What documents do I need to pass an emissions test? The vehicle registration or renewal notice and payment — the complete list for the standard case. The renewal notice matters double: it names whether the test is due and any special station requirements (Star directives, test-only language). Everything else on the pass checklist is the car's condition, not paperwork.

How do I know if my car is ready for the emissions test? The readiness monitors: complete after 50-100 miles of mixed driving following any battery event, verifiable with a free OBD code-read at any parts store — the screen shows each monitor's ready/not-ready flag. All required flags ready plus a dark check-engine light means the car will be tested, not surprised.

What automatically fails an emissions test? An illuminated check-engine light, incomplete readiness monitors, and visible smoke or exhaust leaks lead every program's list — with evaporative faults (the loose gas cap among them) close behind. Every one is discoverable before the test: the parts-store code-read and a walk-around cover the entire automatic-fail category for free.

The Carbon Monoxide Rule That Has No Exceptions

A running generator produces carbon monoxide at concentrations that can incapacitate a household in minutes. The rule that eliminates the risk is simple: a generator belongs outside, away from the house, in dry weather — always. Not in the garage with the door open, not on a covered porch, not under a window. Open doors don't ventilate enough; CO drifts, seeps, and pools.

Distance matters as much as location. Manufacturers and safety agencies recommend at least 20 feet from any window, door, or vent, with the exhaust pointed away from the structure. Wind direction belongs in the calculation too — a generator placed upwind of the house at 25 feet can still push exhaust through an open window in the next gust.

Detectors complete the defense. Battery-powered CO alarms inside sleeping areas are the backstop for every other mistake. If your generator plan doesn't include a working CO detector with fresh batteries, the plan has a hole no setup discipline fully covers.

Weather, Water, and the Electrocution Triangle

Generators and moisture are a second major injury source. The machine needs rain protection (a canopy, an open-sided generator tent — never an enclosed space) while staying on dry surfaces. Standing water around a generator, wet hands plugging in cords, and cables lying in puddles form the electrocution triangle: eliminate any one of the three.

The connection method matters as much as placement. Two legitimate ways to power a house exist:

1. Extension cords run directly to appliances — acceptable for a few essential devices, using heavy-gauge outdoor-rated cords checked for insulation damage
2. A transfer switch or interlock kit installed by an electrician — the only safe way to power house circuits, because it physically prevents the generator's electricity from flowing back into utility lines

Backfeeding — plugging a generator into a wall outlet to “power the house” — is the most dangerous shortcut in home electricity. It energizes utility lines that line workers assume are dead, and it can destroy the generator when utility power returns. There is no version of backfeeding that is safe.

Fuel: The Hazard That Outlives the Outage

Gasoline storage extends generator risk beyond the storm. Fuel belongs in approved containers, in a detached shed or garage corner away from ignition sources, in quantities matched to realistic runtime — not a shed full of aging cans. Never add fuel to a running or hot generator; spilled gasoline on a hot exhaust manifold ignites instantly, and refueling accidents are among the most common generator injuries.

Stabilize what you store. Gasoline degrades in weeks; a fuel stabilizer keeps emergency reserves viable for a year. The annual ritual that pays off: run the generator's carburetor dry before storage or run the unit monthly under load for 15 minutes. Generators that fail during emergencies usually fail from stale fuel and gummed carburetors, not mechanical breakdown.

The Setup Checklist Worth Taping to the Generator

Before the next outage, run this list once in daylight:

CO detector installed with fresh batteries inside the house

Outdoor location chosen: 20+ feet from openings, exhaust pointed away, dry ground

Rain cover ready that doesn't enclose the unit

Outdoor-rated extension cords inspected, correct gauge for the load

Transfer switch verified working (if installed), or the appliance-by-appliance cord plan written down

Fuel stored in approved containers with stabilizer, siphon or funnel available

Refueling plan: engine off, cool-down time, flashlight for night refuels

Fifteen minutes of preparation converts the checklist from a reading exercise into muscle memory.

Conclusion

Generator safety compresses into a handful of absolute rules: the machine runs outside and far from openings, the house connects only through cords or a transfer switch — never through a wall outlet — fuel gets handled cool and stored properly, and a CO detector guards the sleep of everyone nearby. None of these rules costs much; the generator that follows them is no less useful than one that doesn't, only safe to own for years. For help matching a generator to your home's loads — the other half of safe operation, since chronic overload is its own hazard — the sizing guides at this generator for house resource walk through the wattage math step by step.

FAQ

Can I run a generator in my garage with the door open? No. Garages connected to living spaces trap CO regardless of the open door, and CO migrates through shared walls and door seals. The generator goes outside, 20 feet from the structure, in open air.

How far should a generator be from the house? At least 20 feet from any window, door, or vent, with the exhaust directed away from the building. Add wind direction to the placement decision, since exhaust drifts toward whatever is downwind.

Is it safe to run a generator in the rain? Only with proper protection — an open-sided canopy or generator tent that keeps the unit dry while allowing airflow. Never run a generator in an enclosed space for weather protection, and never touch it or its cords with wet hands.

The Embedded Assistants: Write Where You Work

The first family lives inside the tools you already write in — the document suite's assistant, the email client's drafting, the browser's sidebar. Their strength is context: they see the thread they're replying to, the document's earlier sections, the format you're working in. For the professional whose writing is email, memos, comments, and reports-in-progress, this family delivers most of the value at the lowest friction — no tab, no copy-paste, no second home.

Their ceiling: long-form structure and sustained-argument drafting — a 3,000-word piece with sections and through-lines — where the dedicated environments do better. If your writing day is a thousand small texts, start and likely stay here. If it's documents, read on.

The Long-Form Specialists: The Document Drafters

The second family drafts at document scale: the research-and-outline environments that take a brief and return a structured draft with sections, the long-context models that hold your 10,000 words in view, the tools with citation management for the research-heavy writers. The professional essayist, the report writer, the book-drafting author, the analyst assembling the memo — this is their lane. The craft that works: outline first, drafted section by section, your edits between every pass — the tool assembles the architecture; your voice signs the building.

The quality bar that separates the serious from the slick: factual grounding (does it cite or invent?), structure control (can you rearrange the skeleton before the flesh?), and the revision loop (can you change one section without regenerating the whole?).

The Marketing Platforms: The Calendar Runners

The third family runs content operations: the SEO-optimized article platforms, the social-calendar generators, the campaign systems that produce the week's posts in the brand's voice. The solo marketer, the agency's content desk, the small business feeding its channels — their lane is volume with consistency: brand-voice profiles, keyword briefs, the publish pipeline connected. The content that works here is the content whose job is coverage — the how-to, the comparison, the local page.

The honest limitation: this family optimizes for adequate-at-scale, and the differentiating piece — the essay, the story, the opinion that earns links and followers — still comes from the human's Experience and argument. Brands that feed their channels entirely from this family sound like every other feed; the winners use it for coverage and save the humans for the spikes.

The Editing Polishers: Fix What You Wrote

The fourth family edits: the clarity and grammar polishers that tighten your draft without taking your voice, the style enforcers that hold the brand guide, the plagiarism and AI-detection checkers (increasingly standard in publishing pipelines), and the line-level rewriters that turn the passive mush into prose. Every writer who drafts with the other three families ends the process here — the polish layer is the cost of quality in an AI-drafted world, and the good ones preserve voice while fixing noise.

Matching the Tool to the Writer

The decision, plainly: if your writing lives in email and documents-in-progress, use the embedded assistant and stop. If you draft documents and essays, take the long-form specialist with grounding and structure control. If you run a content calendar, the marketing platform earns its seat — with the human reserved for the differentiating pieces. Everyone ends with an editing pass; pick the polisher that preserves your voice. And the stack's honest size is two: one drafter matched to your shape, one polisher — the five-tool writing stack is the subscription audit's first casualty.

The evaluation constants across families: your voice survives your edits, not the tool's defaults; the facts get checked at the source; and the disclosure norms of your industry (bylines, client work, academic rules) get read before the tool gets used.

Conclusion

The AI writing market in 2026 is four families doing four jobs: embedded assistants for the writing that lives where you work, long-form specialists for documents with structure, marketing platforms for the calendar's coverage, and editing polishers for the final voice-preserving pass. The writing-category filters in a good AI tools directory split listings into exactly these families with user scores per use case — the fastest way to shortlist inside the family you picked. Match the family to your writing's shape, keep the stack at two, check the facts at the source — and the tool serves the voice instead of replacing it.

FAQ

What's the difference between embedded AI assistants and dedicated writing tools? Embedded assistants live inside your email and document apps and excel at context-rich small texts; dedicated long-form tools handle document-scale drafting with outlines, citations, and structure control. Your writing's shape — many small texts or sustained documents — picks the family.

Can AI writing tools match a brand's voice? The marketing platforms hold brand-voice profiles well for coverage content — the how-tos and comparisons — but the differentiating pieces still need the human's argument and experience. Coverage by AI, spikes by human, is the working split.

How many AI writing tools does a writer actually need? Two: one drafter matched to your writing's shape and one editing polisher that preserves your voice. The larger stack fragments your drafts and your budget — the quarterly audit usually collapses it.

The Community's Rituals: The Belonging's Architecture

The opening ritual. The cohort's start ritual: the introductions' format (the video introductions from every member — the goal, the why, the fun fact), the coach's welcome video, the community's norms stated. The opening week's rituals set the culture: the vulnerability modeled by the coach, the support demonstrated in the first threads.

The weekly rhythm's rituals. The Monday's intention posts, the Wednesday's check-in threads, the Friday's wins celebration — the weekly rituals that give the cohort its heartbeat. The coach's participation visible in each ritual: the presence that the community mirrors.

The milestone rituals. The program's milestones marked: the module completions celebrated, the halfway point's reflection, the project launches honored — the rituals that convert the curriculum's progress into the community's shared events.

The closing ritual. The program's completion celebrated: the graduation videos, the reflections, the before-and-after of the members' journeys — the closing that honors the transformation and seeds the alumni relationship.

The Video Formats: The Coach's Presence at Scale

The weekly presence video. The coach's five-minute weekly video: the cohort's progress acknowledged, the week's theme set, the questions answered collectively — the presence that the asynchronous community needs to feel led.

The member-celebration formats. The members' wins featured in the coach's videos (with consent): the shout-outs, the story highlights, the progress clips — the celebration formats that train the community's culture of support.

The hot-seat and case-study videos. The member's challenge worked live (with consent): the coaching demonstrated, the community learning from the process — the hot-seat's format that serves the individual and the cohort simultaneously.

The Q&A and office-hours recordings. The questions answered once, archived forever: the searchable library of the coach's answers, the community's self-service layer.

The Cultivation's Discipline: The Community's Management

The coach's presence rhythm. The coach's daily or every-other-day visibility: the thread replies, the celebration comments, the direct-support messages — the presence's consistency that the community's trust requires. The presence scheduled into the coach's calendar as the delivery, not as the leftover.

The community's champions cultivated. The senior members and the natural leaders empowered as the community's champions — the champions' roles defined, their contributions recognized, the culture's co-ownership distributed. The champion-cultivation is the community's scaling mechanism.

The negativity's management. The community's conflicts and the negativity addressed promptly: the norms enforced with the fairness, the members' issues moved to the private channels, the culture protected from the single member's erosion. The moderation is the community's gardening.

The Measurement: The Community's Health Metrics

The engagement's metrics: the participation rates per ritual, the response times, the member-to-member interaction ratio (the community's health measured by the members' support of each other, not just the coach's replies).

The retention's correlation: the engaged members' completion and renewal rates versus the silent members' — the community's engagement data proving the belonging's business value.

And the sentiment's monitoring: the community's mood tracked through the content and the interactions — the culture's health checked, the drifts addressed, the wins amplified.

Conclusion

The coaching program's community cultivation turns the member list into the cohort: the opening rituals that set the culture, the weekly rhythms that give it the heartbeat, the video formats that carry the coach's presence at scale, the champions cultivated for the community's co-ownership, and the negativity's gardening that protects the culture — the belonging that retains the members and powers the referrals. The video tools suited to community cultivation, free tiers included, are catalogued at AI Video Generator Free. The curriculum teaches; the community keeps the members — the cultivation is the retention's craft.

FAQ

How do coaching programs build community in cohorts? The rituals' architecture: the opening introductions that set the culture, the weekly rhythms (the intentions, the check-ins, the wins), the milestone celebrations, and the closing rituals — the belonging built by the repeated structure and the coach's visible presence.

What's the coach's role in the program community after the content is delivered? The weekly presence video, the thread replies, the celebration participation, and the hot-seat coaching — the coach's consistent visibility is what the community's trust and activity mirror. The presence scheduled as the delivery, not left to the leftover time.

How do program communities handle negativity between members? The norms stated at the opening, the conflicts moved to the private channels quickly, the moderation's fairness consistent, and the culture's protection prioritized — the gardening that keeps the community safe for the vulnerability that makes it valuable.

The Two Numbers Defined

Sizing Against Both Numbers

The Common Confusions and Their Corrections

Conclusion

FAQ

How many starting watts do I need for a refrigerator? A typical refrigerator draws 700-800W running but demands 1,500-2,200W at compressor startup — the surge arithmetic that surprises buyers. Generators sized for refrigeration carry surge capacity covering the kick; the newer inverter generators manage it with soft-start electronics.

Can I run a well pump on a 5,000-watt generator? Usually yes: the pump's 1,000-2,000W running load fits easily, but its startup surge (2-3x running, sometimes 4,000W+) dictates the generator's surge capacity — which is why the 5,500-6,500W class with strong surge ratings is the well-pump household's standard answer.

The Bill's Anatomy: What You're Actually Paying

The quote's script: “What's the total, certificate included, for my year and model?” — the one question's being the bill's prediction.

The Discounts' Legitimate Map

The low-income's and the senior's programs: some regions' assistance schemes and the shops' standing discounts — the eligibility's simple ask costing nothing. The comparison's honest tool ties the whole map together: a small notebook of the area's stations, their out-the-door totals, their retest policies, and their coupons' seasonal rhythms — the payer's own little price book being the savings system that outlives any single coupon's short season.

The Free Savings: Timing and Preparation

The summary's payer's card: ask for the out-the-door number, stack the coupon's on the quiet hour, prepare the car for the first-visit's pass — the smog check's cost being the payer's arithmetic as much as the station's sign.

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if you are not a regular user of a niche internet microcommunity like the dark fediverse, irc channels, mumble servers, forums, micro-imageboards, dead social media sites, maybe the community servers of a 20 year old video game, or god forbid, a discord server with racial slurs, this post has left its intended audience and to consider anything beyond this as merely anything more than an anthropological record of the schizoid ramblings for an ideologically captured dysgenic philosophy is a fool's errand. you've been warned. also this was written in like an hour so good luck. if hn or reddit finds this then we've already left.

the age of computing is dead.

oh my god i swear to god i am so fucking tired of retarded insane techbro ai maximalist hysteria i can't read anoth- STOP. shut the FUCK UP. do not confuse the chattering of an anthill with the rumble of the tank that i will describe.

human life has many facets with endless depths of value and meaning and all that is good and holy. in no particular order, there is the classic pursuit of happiness, the fostering of a family, building of community, the crusade of providing the means of flourishing, the search for the grace and understanding of ultimate good, the striving for an ideal, the toil and sacrifice for purpose, and the journey for the connection of souls. what i will be talking about is none of these, and matters far less, but still controls societies, generations, countries, the battlefield of nations and the transnational alliance of men with power. what i am talking about are the “flames” of society.

every so often, and quite regularly in fact, certain ideas flame up and can seem to summon cabals of niche, highly influential and consequential (to the world of men) from nothing. for instance, we take the idea of civil liberties almost as a practical forgone conclusion of moral philosophy, but not that long ago, people regularly met in exclusive late night gatherings they called salons debating feminist and marxist ideals. before then it was coffee shops. in high school history classes we study the events like the succession of the colonies and the french revolution as the main focus, with salons and coffee shops as the quaint factoids of the era, and receive basically brochure of the movements as a dry thesis of a philosophy long played out. what we do not focus on are the experience of members that formed these social flames.

we assume that you are already steeped in the zeitgeist of whatever hot button topic of gas stoves or immigration or abortion or lgbt rights or civil rights or slavery (i cannot make it clear enough that i am not fucking talking about ai), so there is no need to generalize this to overarching issues that span generations which i am referring to as ages or flames of society. [1]. the civil rights movement is not an isolated 10 year movement for gods sake it was merely a small flare from a campfire that has been dying down for a while now. and if you are about to say that your tiktok comments or no kings protests where you go to a preassigned location with a sign, yell a bit, and then go home is the same then you are malignantly and apparatchikly ignoring the objective decline from the impassioned spirits that filled countless speakeasies and houses and i will beat you with the buttstock of my rifle.

another example was the railroads, think about how invigorated all those railroad executives must have felt carrying out what they felt was their divine mission of expansion across the united states and europe. their national manifest destiny was definitely present but can be considered to have melted in the face of endless bounties that await at the altar of industrialization, transportation, and mobility, a movement that crossed borders, ethnicities, and nationalities. and if you need a clearer example of what the embers look like, just look at what modern transportation enthusiasts look like now. there's actually a lot of interesting developments of gondola systems being deployed due to their cost effectiveness at the moment if you were not aware but that's not the point.

the point is the age that you and i have been steeped in for generations has come to an end. the age of building the first mechanical tabulators, to the age of hand-wiring core memory for military targeting calculators, to hand punching fortran mainframe punchcards for banking systems, to the ontological innovations of bell labs, to the explosive power of apple and microsoft pcs, the entrepreneurial spirit of early internet startups, the eventual triumph of open source, the subsumption of silicon valley of venture capital firms, to the institutionalization of big tech giants. it has all come to an end.

here is the pudding: every single tech trend can now be labeled a form of devolution. the attempt to reify nostalgia like bbses, newsgroups, irc servers, phpBB forums, windows vista rices, devolution. the retreat to self-hosted open source software, devolution. the evacuation to alternative social media, devolution. the fortified bunker of local-first, devolution. the ai prophets may on one hand talk about the endless wealth and value that will come from the new world order but they have already begun to convert to becoming doomsday apocalypticists. [2] i think they have realized that even if every human was given the power of superintelligence to eliminate all intellectual and systemic friction from the world, it may not lead to the utopia that they have hoped, devolution. we literally have an entire movement called degrowth for gods sake.

there are other attempts to save the dying embers by attempting to transplant tech onto so deemed fertile grounds, like a simulacra of reality via the metaverse, to keep the circuses running with lower structural costs (hey at least the steam frame looks cool). or transplanting to the financial backbones with cryptocurrency that /biz/ investors currently post red and pink images on, i'm sure they're enjoying their casino. or perhaps the interactive computing of folk.computer or dynamicland to recapture that bell labs magic. or perhaps revitalizing american manufacturing through home fabrication communities like 3d printing, chemistry, biology, robotics, rockets, drones, lasers and vehicles. [3] but no matter how many humanoid robotics startups using scada and 6-dof arms to manufacture their robots or el-segundo drone startups relying solely on cheap chinese jet microturbines we create, it will not change the fact that the fire has begun to smoke, the hearth has burned down, and the embers are gasping for breath. these last attempts may even succeed at keeping the fire going for a small while, but there is not enough material in any of these places to keep the fire going as it used to.

that is not to say that we are personally facing dark ages. there is tremendous qualia to be gained. more pudding: i feel like most people have at least on a subconscious level realized this, and the rise of tradcaths, orthodox christians, hustle culture people reifying work, and i hope taoists [4] i think prove this claim. and if not for all those just educating themselves, cleaning apartments, trying to raise families, finding lifelong partners (i will be alone forever if you couldn't tell already), and building things. this is not a bad thing, quale is your pathway to god and all that ever matters, and i encourage you to always continue with it. but it is still undeniable and a shame that our flame has ended.

what awaits us now is the endless flood of p-zombie normies, so addled by their addictions to short form media, ragebait, vagueposting, and self-propaganda so controlled by their dependency on tech giants for their basic functioning that they are calling out to the institutions to subsume all their responsibilities for self-control, restraint, intentionality, and parenting now [5], to which their beloved institutions will gladly implement complete surveillance, ID verification and surprisingly smooth transfer of the national digital infrastructure, and so as like the railroads were transferred to the quasi-governmental organization of amtrak which would initially seem promising but quickly degrade to the barely functional mess it is today, so too will the online platforms be transferred to the quasi-governmental organization of uhhh, checks notes, the us tech oligarchy and palantir. i'm sure their ai platform will definitely be very maintainable and functional and good and overall go great. let it be known to the anals (sic) of history that woo roko's basi-i mean go palantir, woo! honestly i don't think it will be that successful, but the dying of the computational flame is well underway. i think when this fails, some in power may attempt to gel the nations with the highly effective implement of war [6] [7].

i'm not exactly sure where or what we will disperse into, but i think it will probably not be computers [8], even as i plan to create software and run this server in some capacity until i die. and i don't mean to say that there will never not be computers, perhaps after things die down, the only ones that remain will be the true nerds again, the autists and the schizoids and the dysgenic, the weirdos among weirdos, the outcasts among “outcasts”, where we may exchange soft conversations and arguments within our meek spaces, rebuilt from the ashes. or perhaps a new spark will soon catch a natural oilfield ablaze and we will all be swept up in the whirlwind.

regardless, i hope that wherever we find ourselves together again, we can all delight in the flames of the roaring hearth, but most fondly, the small brilliant sparks we shared, once again.

footnotes

1. if you will notice, god-given inaliable/civil/minority rights happily spans across the industrial revolution and computers so these are not linear and not exclusive
2. muahahaha i lied
3. i myself recently and an entire youtube niche of superfastmatt, styropyro, nilred, thought emporium, xyla foxlin, etc have been enjoying cading, welding, cnc milling and fabricating things. you should join me or at least tell me on fedi so i can follow you
4. fedi me please i need friends
5. i have a lot of thoughts about the abdication of personal responsibility and why lots of societal institutions (like policing) will forever be “cursed” or doomed for failure but that is for another blog post and not this one.
6. this has actually already happened. this is literally putin's entire philosophy and reasoning behind invading ukraine, supposedly it is not for ukraine, but chiefly to excise the modern laxity and evils of western society. he should probably be compassionately and personally nuked.
7. personally i really do think that something is coming down the pipe but i am not exactly sure what it will be, or how i can prepare besides keeping myself financially secure, minimizing stuff where possible, and the usual training/working out. between fleeing early or digging in, i love where i live so i am inclined to extend my roots in this area, although i have the feeling that this will end bad for me as a minority. if you have thoughts on this please let me know.
8. if nothing else, if you find out, please let me know. thanks

we've all seen all the ai-produced memes and art that have exploded onto the internet, especially after the release of stable diffusion, and text content which can be generated with chatgpt. both of these have lead to a ton of creative uses (particularly stable diffusion over verbose, generic unhelpful chatgpt-written text), but also some talk on how it'll be harder to tell what is real on the internet after anyone can create realistic looking images and long-form text easily. but they're missing the point:

nothing on the internet is real

none of it. i don't care if it's “fact checked”, i don't care if it's certified by a real xyz professional, i don't care if it's self-evident, none of it is real.

when the internet started becoming popular, we would say to never talk about your real life on the internet, don't say your name online, don't share your birthday, don't trust anything you read on the internet, and we all somehow seemed to have forgotten this over years and years of the internet becoming normalized, mobile phones democratizing technology to even the most technologically-impaired. it's easy to think that the internet has made the lines between reality and online much more blurred. but they aren't, and it's easy to fix if you just consider everything online to not be real! now, this might seem to be an almost schizophrenic-level position to hold, but don't worry, there's lots of good reasons to believe so:

information on the internet isn't real

the internet has been described as bringing humanity into the informational age, as this vast store of human knowledge, but it's not. it's the accumulation of data, which can be and is often very different from objective reality. and the data on the internet has always been junk. we've known this from the beginning, search any argument and you will find a billion results affirming why something is one way, search the opposite and you will find another billion results affirming the other.

this problem isn't new, (imo) it's the fundamental question behind the philosophical question of postmodernism, and one that philosophers have been wrestling with for decades (and have made some interesting thoughts about). this isn't an insurmountable problem in many cases, one can generally find working conclusions from the data, but it isn't the case when things get muddier, which reality tends to do quite frequently. in those cases, it's easy to pick the easiest solution that explains most of the data, but it's easy to forget the main points: the data may or may not be real, and thus the conclusions from that data may or may not be real, because information from the internet works like we do: dreaming or hallucinating.

the human brain is an incredible thinking machine, but often times that thinking isn't done consciously, or even when we're awake. how many times have you had a problem you were thinking of, and the pieces seem to only come together after you've slept or dreamt of it? how many times have you found something just because you thought something else was the case and stumbled onto the true answer? we can have complete knowledge that something was a dream, or a mistake (a hallucination), but we can still use those to consciously discover real truths, make real conclusions, and create real artworks and content, without ever losing our ability what to distinguish what is real and what was just a dream, which would be the definition of psychosis. we just need to remember that internet content are like the dreams and the misconceptions (hallucinations) we have along the way, and that believing that internet content is real would be the real delusion.

i think ai can help in this regard. a really good description of ai-generated content is how ai “hallucinates” its results, it doesn't use logic or reason (obviously, it's like glorified markov chains, why the hell would you think it's real), and as ai proliferates, more of this hallucinated content will make it's way to the internet. i think being confronted with such obviously hallucinated content (people with 7 fingers, text content presenting obvious fallacies with complete confidence, etc) will force people to realize that not just some, but all internet content are basically just hallucinations!

“but!” you say, “i can read a guide on how to fix my car on the internet and gain the actual knowledge to actually fix my car! surely that can't be fake!”

unfortunately:

knowledge on the internet isn't real

while your fixed car might not be a delusion, believing you had the knowledge of fixing your car, until you actually fixed it would be. consider me: i don't know car maintenance as well as i wish i did, and i recently just got my tires changed by professionals. i could have watched youtube videos on how to change tires, read countless articles about what steps to follow when changing tires, even used virtual reality applications to simulate changing a tire, but would i have any actual knowledge on how to change a tire? i would say no, i wouldn't know the intricacies of how certain techniques in changing a tire can affect the other parts of the car, what quirks some models of cars have with lug nuts, the sensory feedback of physically changing a real tire in the real world on a real car, all of the things that a real tire professional has that makes them good at their job.

instead, by using all that internet content, i might have some idea of what changing a tire is like in reality like how some parts of a dream might match up to reality, in truth i have only tricked myself into believing that i might have some knowledge of how to change tires, until I did it myself, and probably realized that no, i should've made sure the lug nuts were perfectly clean, that my torque wrench needs to be adjusted 10% more because it's a cheap one from harbor freight, oh god i missed the click and just snapped the bolt completely off and i forgot to chock the car and now it's fallen off the jack stands and-

in other words, i would've been confronted with the actual reality that i didn't have the real-world knowledge, the real-world experience that i paid a real-world professional to do it for instead. and it's even clearer to see when considering something as banal as entering all your symptoms onto webmd (don't worry, we've all done it). the age old story of “oh god, i have appendicitis, i have an ulcur, i have stomach cancer”, when a doctor with real world knowledge goes “no, you had taco bell and have gas” is one that you might have to live for yourself if you don't agree.

“but!” you might say, “even if i can't get the real experience of changing a tire through the internet, i can still get real experiences through the internet, the emotions and actions that i experience using online spaces is happening in the real world and is real!”

even more unfortunately:

experiences on the internet aren't real

this might be a bitter pill to swallow, considering how much some of us have invested our lives onto the internet at this point. and this isn't to say that so many people's lives haven't been irrefutably improved by the internet. but to assert that the experiences on the internet are the same as real life would be a grave mistake.

and it's easy to understand by hanging out with people online. being an introvert, i've always had internet friends, and the fact that i can connect with so many people i could otherwise never have even known at all is a great blessing. if you've seen my profile, you probably know that i'm a rather large gun nut, and maintaining the tools and abilities needed for my personal protection is a personal aim that i've had for a long time. and because of that, i've surprisingly (for an extreme introvert) have not shied away from meeting internet people in real life, and have always enjoyed it very much! (try it, it's really not that scary as you might think, even though telling someone else and carrying pepper spray at the very least is probably still a good idea).

for me, it's always fascinating how different people might be in person from what you might have in your head from their online persona. but more importantly, how different of an experience it might be to hanging out with them online. even if they're exactly the same as how they are online (which imo is not very often the case), the experience can still be completely different (and very rarely the case in a bad way).

on it's own, an online experience being different than the real-world one might not be enough to convince you that an online experience isn't real. however, i just ask you to consider the difference between watching a pov video of someone jumping out of an airplane and actually jumping out of an airplane, and why we're so hesitant to apply the same logic to all of our online interactions, not just the really fun paramotoring videos i could watch so much of. while dreams can be fun, there are definitely some dreams that i'm glad i could wake up from. while the assurance that something is a dream might be nice to have, the realization that a lifetime was is most assuredly not.

so, the internet isn't real

and that's ok. the internet doesn't have to be real, just like dreams don't need to be real, but that doesn't mean that the things you read online, your misconceptions (remember, hallucinations), online friends, the fun video and voice calls, the group chats, the online discussions and arguments, that one person who really pisses you off, that one really funny comment, the sometimes disturbing memes people share, the big-boobied ai-generated anime girls, the overly niche micro-communities, the embarrassing parasocial attachments, that one person you were so scared to talk to but turned out to be really nice, the tear-jerkers, the “it's so over”s, all the “we're so back”, the vicarous experiences and all the rest aren't any less valuable to the only thing that truly matters and uses all of it for better or worse, whether you want it to or not:

reality!

and that's really something worth being real about (fr fr no cap on god)

Well whatever time to serve up some fresh content™ for the blog readers at home.

where the fuck i've been

My last blog post was a Japanese learning update, and good gods did I drop the ball on that. I've taken to doing the bare minimum of Japanese refolding, which involved some content watching and keeping up my Anki streak. Even then, I think I got so burnt out on refolding that some days I couldn't even do Anki right.

I then picked up a comfy slice-of-life show and realized “maybe I should be watching things I enjoy instead of trying to min-max comprehension”. So now I'm watching whatever the fuck anime and youtube vids I wanna watch. Sue me.

At the same time, I'm in my final semester of college! Surreal I've been at this degree program for five years (don't ask why I'm delayed) and I'm still not done. One more sem though. Then I can finally join the corporate world as a codemonkey.

the key realization

I am going to infodump on the blog.

Seriously, I have a whole second brain full of notes and junk on various things I'm interested in. I wanna keep that second brain up but I also wanna express what I'm collecting, hence this blog becomes my dumping ground. No one asked for this but I'll be damned if I let that stop me.

More posts soon, unless I forget and/or run out of steam. Peace.

p.s.

Writefreely does not come with image hosting. Shame, as I planned to style my posts with extensive images, in the style of some bloggers I follow. This can be solved by externally hosting my images, but I'm not sure where I can do that with little to no cost that would also respect my privacy. If anyone knows any service like that, I'm all ears.

i've talked a bit before how i have problems with hyperhidrosis (aka sweaty hands) but liquid chalk is now my go to for this issue over gloves for activities like weightlifting and here's why:

• when applying to your hands, it looks and feels like a typical hand lotion, even though it uses an alcohol base to quickly evaporate after 20-30 seconds or so. after being rinsed off, it leaves my hands feeling better than before, while providing all the benefits of chalk
• by using liquid, the chalk is applied incredibly evenly and only to the areas that you need it. no more chalk in between the crevices of your fingers or whatnot, it looks exactly like a handprint outline
• the biggest benefit: no extra powdery chalk. since it's applied by evaporation, all the applied chalk is properly bound to your hand and there's no loose powder. this means there's no excess chalk that can fall off, get into the air, or be brushed off.
• since the chalk is firmly attached to your hand, much less of it will be transferred to whatever you touch. there will still be some white transfer from the chalk to whatever you're touching, but it's like 90% less of what you'd find from regular chalk. this means that more chalk is staying on your hands to actually be used and it's easier to clean up
• kind of side point: some gyms and other places that dislike chalk may be ok with liquid chalk if you show how it doesn't get into the air and how much cleaner it is than regular chalk, but i doubt this benefit is really realized very often

so, you might say, what's the catch? and there's only one: the price. liquid chalk is more expensive than regular chalk, but for the above benefits you're getting, i say that it's very well worth the cost.

this review is based off of sportmediq liquid chalk i got but i bet they're all pretty similar. anyways i love this shit lol

So it's been 3 months since i've been learning japanese via the refold method, and here's the updates.

the daily routine

I've strived to at least do the following two things:

• do my flashcards
• watch some Japanese content

So far, I can still count on one had the times I've missed a day of flashcard reviews. Japanese content, on the other hand, is still a challenge to get through. I find my attention wandering most often, since the content doesn't yet engage me and I'm still trying to make my way out of that cave of “not understanding most of anything”. There are small victories here and there, but so far, I still need more time.

what to improve next

I need to study grammar more intensively, and clock more hours per day into Japanese content as a whole. Right now, I barely watch content, around 20 minutes per day, but I want to get that up to at least 1 hour of Japanese content immersion daily. As for grammar study, this should be as simple as watching this playlist every day until I finish it, then repeat if necessary.

conclusion

Lots of stuff to review, still more time I need to clock in. The process is overall, still very simple, I just need to refocus and keep logging those hours into content immersion. See you all 6 months in, roughly 2022-10-20.

A long term project has begun.

This post marks my third day of learning Japanese.

(inb4 filthy weaboo)

What?

Yeah! I'm learning Japanese. This all started because of a YouTube video I randomly picked to listen to while working out. The video in question was an interview where the interviewee, Matt vs Japan, gave his experience and thoughts on learning the language. The more I listened to it, the more his methods and hypothesis on language acquisition made sense. In particular, the “immersion in content in the target language” bit resonated hard with me, as that's how I learned English.

The method

So the method is outlined better over at Refold (link to website), but here's the jist of it:

1. Work on vocab through Anki.
2. Casually study basic grammar, enough to recognize the grammar in regular use.
3. Rack up hours upon hours of immersion in the target language.

Where I'm at

Since it's only been day 3, I've very, very low comprehension. About 2% of stuff I can actually understand, mostly greetings, and some statements about temperature (when a character says “too warm/cold!”). My main immersion comes from rewatching Yuru Camp with Japanese subs only, with some additional immersion coming from various Japanese youtubers that I've subscribed to. I've been consistent in Anki and grammar study, and I intend to keep that consistency up for the long term.

Next time, on “gen learns Japanese”

I intend to update on the 3 month mark, roughly 2022-07-20. See you then!

There's an ongoing narrative that goes a little something like this:

As a student, if you're burnt out, that's a result of poor planning and lifestyle on your part. You should have planned well the classes you took this semester, and you should have good time management skills so as to balance your school work and your life.

This is the common narrative thrown in the face of countless burnt out, tired students when they begin to complain that “college is too difficult” or “the professors are too demanding”. And while there are those lazy students who simply join in the choir hoping for some easy passes, a majority of these students actually experience overload in their course requirements. Overload that is justified by the ongoing narrative of “students should take responsibility for their workload”. I say, yes indeed, students should take responsibility for their workload. But at what point are students even made aware of their workload? When does a student get to know how much time is required weekly for a specific class? Is this information provided before the sign up period for classes? During the sign up period? Or, as is the case most often, only when the classes begin?

Unfortunately, there is no time metric for classes, or at least not one that's standard across most universities. There exist systems within specific universities that attempt to measure the weight of a class, but they're often unspecific or just plain wrong. Take my university for example. Each class is given a number of “units”. These “units” range from 1 up to 4, and every student must take a minimum number of “units” per semester. The thing is, “units” are inconsistent. There are physical fitness classes that, while being an essential part of the curriculum and are not optional, are given a 1 “unit” score, and aren't even counted towards the total number of units. Meanwhile, there are classes that essentially are two-in-one, theory and practice, lecture and laboratory work classes, that are only given a measly 3 “units”, despite functionally being two different classes. No functional standard exists.

There is an even worse problem perpetuated by the ongoing narrative. The narrative puts all the responsibility on the student, and none on the professors who preside over and teach the classes. Professors are absolved of any responsibility to respect the time of students. They're under no obligation to provide a reasonable amount of time per day or week to spend on their classes. Professors aren't made to make their lectures concise or accessible, instead they are allowed to pad their lecture out with as much fluff and noise as possible. Did you think to ask a professor for their syllabus before signing up to the class? Good luck getting a response, much less a response with any respect. This lack of responsibility makes the job of the student much less about actually learning, and more on navigating and slogging through hours and hours of coursework that the student didn't even know they were signing up for. While time management skills and good planning can help, especially if you ask previous students of class you plan to take, only so much of that can help in the face of professors who blatantly take up more and more time for no real good reason.

(Oh, and I don't even want to hear the classic excuse of “but professors have it hard too!” I don't give a shit about your shitty situation if you insist on passing on your shitty luck to us students in the form of shitty time wasting work.)

Given all of this, what is there to be done? The system certainly won't change, but student behaviors can, and there are a few strategies to be able to cope with professors wasting time. I've listed a few suggestions below, but use these wisely. I ain't about to be blamed if you start harassing the person who grades you.

• When given a task, don't be afraid to ask the professor “how much time should we spend on this?”. You can make the question more specific, by asking how much time per day or per week, or how much time the professor thinks we should take to finish. If they give a non answer, ask for a suggestion. Press this matter as far as you can reasonably get it.
• Ask around for higher level students or alumni that have taken the same class under the same professor. Ask them about their experience, and how much time the class ended up eating from their weeks and days.
• Abuse attendance checking and absence rules. As soon as a class takes your attendance, that's your signal to be able to leave when you feel you're not getting anything more out of being physically there. If a class is online, you don't necessarily have to be paying attention, or even be attending. If accosted by the professor, simply state that you have other matters that need taking care of, or respectfully state that you are needed elsewhere unexpectedly. You don't have to give a reason if you don't want to, unless there's some weird rule that allows professors to be particularly personally invasive.
• Work in parallel with your professor. Instead of complaining about them and asking them to change, team up with your fellow classmates and collect resources that are more time efficient, but cover the same material. Don't be afraid to push the boundaries of collaboration. As long as you know what constitutes plagiarism, cheating, or whatever bullshit offense the university has, you can work with your classmates at a level just below that, and offer a parallel, more time efficient way to learn the same material.

In the end, while the system is broken and professors are still going to be mostly shit at doing the teaching part of their jobs, there are ways to counteract their bullshit.

I hope my rant and suggestions help you. If you have any comments about this article, thoughts to share with me, or violent reactions for me to ignore if you're a professor, just reach out to me on Fedi.

having an interconnected network of free trade has definitely given us many benefits in technological progress and standard of living in spite of popular critics like kaczynski (better known for other work) et al. and yet, in spite of the grand achievement of getting to pick between 18 slightly different formulations of ketchup at the grocery store, it does feel like we've lost something, hasn't it? this isn't as sarcastic of a question as you might think, there are many people who don't particularly care or believe that it's necessary for everyone know exactly where their egg came from.

i was having an interesting conversation with someone with a strong self-professed love of communism and labor theory, and i'm going to attempt to recreate their argument as accurately as possible, but most likely completely butcher it 😩. much of modern day technology, such as vaccines or semiconductors, is so complex that it necessarily requires extensive and highly reliant supply chains to be viable. by objective metrics, this has proven to substantially increase quality of life, and regression from this ideal, as suggested by critics such as kaczynski (again, better known for other work) is either malicious or misguided at best. instead, efforts should be made towards improving overall system trust, efficiency and resiliency; just because a system grows beyond a single person's scale doesn't make it inherently bad, there just needs more work to be done.

i can appreciate this argument, but as you can guess, i beg to differ: supply chains need to be community-sized because the egg matters, for several reasons:

• awareness: without awareness of the entire production of a product, of course we will naturally underestimate the labor and material cost involved. at best, this can just be a benign lapse, like forgetting an ingredient in a recipe after making it. more often, it can lead to dramatic amnesia, such as when naysayers of electric cars love to point out the heavy effects of lithium mining or the burning of coal to power the electrical grid. at worst, corporations, with a vested interest to make their product seem greener than it might actually be, might maliciously mislead consumers and obfuscate its components.
• value: with increased awareness, we can begin to appreciate products beyond a simple market-priced monetary value, but with the full wonder of the sum of its whole production. what was once an egg that magically popped into existence moments before arriving on the grocery store shelf suddenly becomes an egg grown by one of Jim's chickens, transported and stored by Cheryll, who was then purchased by you. in this model, the social value of a egg can change dramatically if sourced from a farm known for unethical practices for example, even while the market value remains the same. the same cannot be said of the magical egg, stripped of any social or communal value, which could be replaced by a farm halfway across the country without you even realizing it.
• conscientiousness: this may seem self-evident, as a natural consequence of increased awareness and value. and yet, its importance can not be understated. only with increased awareness can consumers produce fully accurate valuations of products, which you might be more inclined to use before it goes bad than a magically instantiated egg. in this way, decreases in consumption occurs naturally and effortlessly from the bottom up, rather than a top-down method of gating consumption at the time of purchase. the psychological benefits of such a less cognitively-intensive model shouldn't be ignored.
• decentralization: shortened supply chains may not be able to service as many people, but with less dependencies, they can be proliferated in a more decentralized way. while there may still be common, traditionally-produced materials used in these local supply chains, most of the supply chain being distributed means that consumers won't just have more options in total, but also that producers will have the chance to uniquely tailor their products directly for their local community.
• resiliency: by promoting decentralization in supply chains, they will naturally be more fault-tolerant to remote instability due to their local nature, and will also have more decentralized options to source alternatives from. recovery will be less bottlenecked by singular outages, improving responsiveness.
• participation: finally, with more local production, consumers will have more opportunities to shape products with their consumer habits, and even get directly involved with producers. where personal relationships were once impossible, now has the opportunity to help communities grow stronger as they can work to better meet each other's needs.

so how do we do this? it's easy, and doesn't require changing how technological progress occurs, only where we apply it. instead of only applying technological improvements to the total efficiency of production, we can target towards a combined heuristic of efficiency given scope. while this may decrease total efficiency on paper, i believe that the listed benefits will greatly reduce consumption, waste, impact and emissions more than any marginal increase in efficiency could ever bring.

however, there's one final benefit that i believe might be one of the most valuable of all. as focus shifts from incremental improvements in efficiency to that of self-sufficiency and versatility, singular technological advancements can be applied exponentially through decentralized supply chains, resulting in massive improvements to overall production that aren't even possible with marginal efficiency increases of conventional supply chains. (computer scientists will groan as i reference big o notation. don't lie, you were thinking of it)

3d printing is a good example of this in action in recent history. on the surface, it may seem like a less efficient method of production that generally results in weaker materials than an equivalent one milled from metal or wood. however, where before you might have had to ship materials out to a dedicated milling facility where they used incredibly expensive and complicated machines to create custom objects, or buy lots of specialized tooling to carve things out of wood, things can now can be flexibly and easily printed with the touch of a button. far from being useless or simple toys, i think the ingenuity of the 3d printing community can speak for itself, as they've found so many ways to produce replacement parts for complex machinery like tractors, or even full, resilient tools like guns. the value of technological advances like 3d printing doesn't just come from easier creation of individual bespoke components, but instead from allowing these previously-prohibitive production chains to become more accessible, since one object no longer requires expensive/special machinery which all have their own dependency chains on their own.

there's a lot to be gained from shorter supply chains and luckily, each of us has the power to make this a reality by buying locally, or from companies committed to keeping their production as local as possible. as you might begin to think about the production chains in your life, i urge you to consider not just total efficiency, but overall scale and structure as well. and then you might agree with me, that those eggs could be so much more valuable if they just had a little less magic.

this post was originally found on my fediverse account. it has been reposted here for easier reading and visibility.

we've surely all had people that, when you attempt to talk to them, it takes them a very long time to respond if at all. i've had several people like this in my life. while sometimes it's not quite their fault, differing timezones or life gets busy, it shouldn't also be my problem that they don't contact me when i want them to.

in the past, i'd harbor resentment to these people. “why won't they respond” or “why won't they talk to me”. very unhealthy, but now i've made a way to deal with this.

match priority. if it seems that they don't make any effort to try and keep in touch, just lower their priority in your life. you don't have to be friends with everyone. if i am not enough of a priority to be responded to, i should match that and lower or stop attempting to contact them.

it makes no sense to leave the safety of civilization and intentionally subject yourself to the whims of nature, wild animals, and whatever else unknowns that may be lurking, moreso to do so solo, with only what you can carry on your back. and yet, talk to almost any backpacker you know and they can probably confirm that backpacking can be one of the most meaningful experiences of your life.

it's a peculiar kind of risk, because most backpackers will probably say they aren't in it for the adrenaline rush or to prove that they can survive by themselves (bushcrafting remains niche, after all). it's not what you might expect from other kinds of risk-taking; there's no thrill, no gain to be had when you return from a trail, yet the payoff still remains large.

a more rational person might say that this risk is unnecessary and a walk around the paved paths of a national parking lot seems a lot more comfortable instead. why go through all the trouble of backpacking when you can get better photos from national parks for instagram anyways? or why not book a camping site on a concrete foundation, i hear they even have wifi nowadays! just seems a bit stupid, maybe.

motorcycling is a bit more negatively-fetishized when the risk is roughly comparable to.... swimming. don't get me wrong, it's pretty easy to thrill-seek on a motorcycle. yet ask a motorcyclist for they truly enjoy about motorcycle rides, and it could just be the simple pleasure of riding, sure. but i'd wager that you might get an anecdote that sounds similar to the backpacker, as they try to explain about the beauty of riding through gorgeous mountains or the feeling of freedom from a long road trip, instead.

none of which require the motorcycle, says the rationalist, really. a car ride is much safer, can carry more, and isn't as susceptible to the weather, anyways. motorcycling is dangerous and unnecessary when cars exist, just seems a bit stupid, maybe.

this isn't to insult those who enjoy camping sites with hookups, or with no interest in motorcycles. some have families or responsibilities that they aren't comfortable with jeopardizing, which is a perfectly valid and reasonable decision. but it would be an insult to equate the value of a national park campsite to roaming the backcountry or motorcycling to that of a car ride. and it's just wrong to say that increased risk is just thrill-seeking or unnecessary.

some activities are inherently more risky, yes. i don't take risks lightly, and if there's a way to offset it, then i will go the extra mile (heh) every time.

but the real risk might be to the sealed bubble of your car with the a/c and radio set exactly to how you like it, to the daily routine of your 9-5 cubicle, to every whim and desire easily accessible with the swipe of a credit card, to the comfort that has so easily rotten countless lives from the inside out until it's too late.

so i'm not afraid to be a bit stupid, maybe.