kind of on a pause over here like i said before but u know i have to post since its in my blood so just gonna keep things in this thread until my full triumphant return
🚛
the “experts” have finally pushed me too far
about to see owenius (tiny owen) on the babyscan screen. i have some to refer to this experience as the natalophony. not sure if they will adopt this term.
interesting linguistic phenomenon related to pregnancy baby stuff is that whenever one needs to refer to the baby’s sex, everyone, universally, uses the term gender. this isnt ideological, its an instinctual recoiling from combining the words “sex” and “baby”. everyone does this.
theoretically these are the last moments wherein i do not know if this creature is boy or girl. very surprisingly, i truly dont feel strongly either way. figured id really want it to go one way or the other but im totally neutral.
been surrounded by women for the last few years so thematically it would make more sense if its a girl. people ask what i think it is, i say that if my life were a story (which it is, mythopoetic symbolic life analysis mindset) it would make more sense if it were a girl.
i am going to make a large image of the saint that tamed the dragon and yoked it to harvest wheat to hang in the kids room. i will implant this deep into its tiny tiny brain
launching owen cyclops lifestyle brand to cover some baby expenses. stylesheet:
shoes: two fish
home: partially submerged hut by the lake with dial up internet
activities: standing nose deep in the water at sunrise and sunset dispensing advice to local teenagers and lost hikers
the rift in the lake dwelling community between people that wear two fish strapped to their feet like sandals vs people who put their feet into the fish’s mouth as though it were a sneaker or boot is, potentially, unhealable
i moved from the baptist county to the catholic county. now there are virgin mary sculptures on lawns and generally standing around. i am attempting to train my dog to instinctually sit in front of, looking at, the larger ones, instead of just passing them by.
getting coffee (rare, its always burnt at “places”, wife wanted “a muffin” [also rare, pregnancy madness takes hold]), a cashieress asks where i moved from, remarks “its more friendly here”. “ha yeah i guess”, i say. “maybe its the catholic baptist thing”, she says, laughing. mfw
shju buy one of these glash coffee maykers, its chaped like an hourglass wish a french name, ju obtain ah lineen filter, ok, this rooins your life you see because, now shu can no longer enjoy zis thing that chu loved, ze coffee, jish ruins yoor ability to publicly consume coffee
before zis fancy coffee mechanishm you had no problem consuming coffee at theesh normal places wish normal people. it was quite fun, shu liked it but now wonsh you have bin eshposed to this coffee maker u only taste the burnt nayshur of the coffee, you rooin thish thing you loved
thees is a ideeology of soshial isholation manifesting in ze coffee, reeally, [sniff] you were better off een ignorance, drinking ze burnt coffee from zeez little payper cups knoweeng nothing about sush refined mechanishms but ju rooined it wish your deezire for progress, you did
okay i, really i completely disagree, okay. when i see man, refining himself and his tools, with some higher ideal in mind, really, thats what civilization is all about. you cant shrink away from that. we have to pursue greatness. when you shrink away from that bad things happen.
i dont think any of us really, truly, want to live in a world where we just accept drinking the burnt coffee because its convenient. okay. thats just fear talking. we want to live in a world where we pursue greatness - no matter the cost. okay. theres going to be come costs there
so yes, alright, maybe now you cant enjoy the coffee in the paper cups with ur friend. i get it. thats rough okay. i get it. ive been there. but at the end of the day, u look in the mirror, you know that you didnt shrink away from your duty, and that, thats better than the coffee
i know i can google it but as im moving and revamping my op im wondering if i should get a substack, i trust you guys more than normal internet, whats the deal, ive never looked at it
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
oh yes. it is time for… our second annual children’s book recommendation thread.
the last one changed amazon’s suggested products list forever. such power we wield.
we take childhood reading very seriously here. allow me to send you some book ideas from the cyclops family hut.
the last recommendations thread was done around our first kid’s book release. that thread is below.
we have another kid’s book dropping before the holidays - presently, the main thing we are pumping is that i have all my books together as a package now. scope-able on my profile:
last intro note: premise. a normal person might describe my wife as a “crunchy mom”. her vibe is in the mix here. books clearly affect a kid’s spirit and psyche so we tend towards things we feel will nurture the brain-spirit in some way. basically, we are the bottom of this meme:
apathy about other people that you come into contact with is really a form of contempt. if you dont care what a person thinks, you obviously dont think very highly of them.
i have this. its the best and worst feature of my personality. recently, i tried to figure out why.
[…]
in some ways, its served me very well. it allowed me to get through basically anything as an artist. if you go down the “whole path”, inevitably you get some harsh critiques or insults. if you don’t care what other people think, you’re just immune. it doesn’t affect you - at all.
on the flip side, the slight contempt for normal people (you see this online here, “normies”) or others in general is caustic. its rarely articulated - you never say it or consciously think it, you may not even notice it, but it forms the subtext for your social interactions.
i’d like to discuss christian and mormon orientations toward knowledge.
for a variety of reasons, mormon theology has been a large topic on X recently. this is one of my main areas of interest, but its difficult to briefly hop into.
so, i really enjoyed reading perelandra:
perelandra is the second book in the space trilogy by c.s. lewis. obviously there will be some spoilers in here.
in the book, there’s a few characters that are obviously proxies: a woman is eve, one figure is the devil. the narrator is obviously, to me, a stand in for the author
ransom, the narrator, who i just read as lewis himself, finds himself in an analogy for the garden of eden. he is observing the devil slowly tempt eve, basically. he’s able to get involved and argue a little bit but, he has to sleep, the devil doesnt - he cant stop the process.
parenting has this odd social dimension where youre always actively engaging with how other people see you.
so i go to this street fair. my son (3) gets stung by a wasp. never been stung before. freaks out. i take him out of the crowd and put him on some grass. he’s fine.
[…]
i also just so happened to have obtained an extremely large gyro seconds before this. in my haste and preference for my own flesh and blood, i abandoned the gyro.
when my son is injured, he just wants things to be normal. he personally insists i go back and re-obtain the gyro.
he doesnt want to talk about being injured, doesnt want any attention, he just wants everything to stay normal and not orbit around him so he can deal with it. great. so he wants me, his dad, eating his food like normal, on this patch of grass while he recovers from a wasp sting.
in the 1977 film ‘wizards’, one of the oddest movies ive seen, the earth is split between two opposing forces: one side uses technology, and one side has forbidden technology and instead uses magic. i thought this was an interesting lens to view the present AI discussion through.
the term “magic” gained its present english meaning at a time when our society was entirely religious. so, obviously, socially dominant religion with its hierarchy, history, and institutions used the term magic to denote what was outside it: witches, the occult, and such things.
however, we no longer live in that world. today, if we remove the baggage from the word magic, we have to be slightly honest and admit that talking to superhuman beings, items with supraphysical holy influence, casting out demons - this is all “magical”, as opposed to scientific.