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
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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
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today i flew to nyc. a guy tells me they just implemented a program where, to drive into lower manhattan, you have to pay $9. its to ease traffic congestion.
why is this unethical? well, if youre familiar with the work of B.F. skinner, its very easy to explain.
here’s why: […]
skinner himself wouldnt have seen this as unethical, but would have clearly recognized it as a form of operant conditioning (conditioning operants, changing people’s volitional actions) - as opposed to classical conditioning (pavlov’s dogs drooling)
can we find it on this chart?
the average person would intuitively see this as some type of punishment. thats what it obviously feels like: you drive into manhattan, you’re punished by having to pay $9. that makes perfect sense.
but its not. in terms of behavior modification, thats not what it is at all.
it's fascinating how quickly a culture's conception of a topic can change. an entire civilization can basically forget or remember large pieces of its own history.
one of the first recent psychologists to treat the phenomenon of self-harm is a guy named steven levenkron.
[...]
of course the phenomenon of self-harm had probably gotten people referred to psychologists for some time. however, when he told his colleagues he was opening a practice specifically focusing on people who engaged in self-mutilation, he got an interesting response from them.
essentially it was that: those people are failed suicides, and we already have a whole network and practice dealing with that.
this is interesting because it means that, up until very recently (he wrote a book about this in 1998), self-harm was viewed as failed suicide attempts
every aspect of having a pregnant wife is almost designed to be a thought experiment that illuminates 1000 aspects of our culture that are always there, but mostly invisible - and therefore difficult to grab until they’re impressing upon you - then suddenly, they’re right there.
consider: the due date. how do they know what day your baby is supposed to be born? well, they give you this date. they don’t tell you, generally (lets presume not out of malevolence) that something like 5% of babies are actually born on their due date. almost no one knows this.
so, your wife naturally tells people this, because everyone asks. if she doesnt tell them (maybe she says “late november”) people flag it as weird. “late november? what do you mean? they didn’t give you a date?”. okay. now you’re kind of crypto-hassling my wife. lets ignore that.
one thing i've enjoy about the internet is getting a window into aspects of people's story that they would never share in normal everyday life. if you're interested here's one of mine.
my life changed forever here, off the main street in burlington vermont. it looks like this:
i was somewhere around my early teens, in a bookstore. i looked up on a bookshelf and saw a purple book spine. i just grabbed it. there was some feeling of providence about this book. i was called to take this book from the shelf.
this is the book. it's called stencil pirates.
it's about doing graffiti with stencils. the idea is that you cut a design into a hard surface, then spray paint it, and the paint just goes through the part you cut out, leaving your image. pretty simple.
if, at some point, you lived around a TV, you may be familiar with ‘festivus’: a holiday george costanza’s father created on seinfeld. as a resident atypical american religion enjoyer, let’s take a slightly academic religious ethnography pass over this (there will be magic).
…
festivus is presented as a holiday created by george’s father as a reaction against commercialism. this holiday is then actually celebrated, and becomes a family tradition.
consciously crafting religion - live. a joke, but its real. is there an existing framework for this? yes.
discordianism is the exact meeting point for the above concepts. it is basically a joke religion, started by nerds, who found religion interesting. the dense node at the center being - if people actually “do it”, in terms of religious scholarship - then its real. it becomes real.