[this part of my journal is mostly “for me”. Take anything i write here with a grain of salt until i edit it at the end of the year. Especially this section]
When people ask what kind of music i like i make up something instead of telling the truth (female singer-songwriter)
Watching more succession. It frustrates me because there is no one to root for. Any time there is a minute where someone talks about ethics or principle they get sucked back into these nihilistic power games. I get that is “the point” but it’s a bit exchausting
Overheard at Chiptole: "I don't enjoy this. I'm just eating to eat"
beginning to feel like capitalism's drive, at least in america, is to be as unlivable and inefficient as possible that life requires enormous expense. see: cars, suburbs, etc (put a pin in this)
mitchell hashimoto is kinda cool. stepped down as CEO of his own $15 billion company to do engineering work. currently spends his time doing "advent of code". imagine being a billionaire and spending your free time doing coding puzzles for fun. that would be me as a billionarie
i should start a developer twitter and post things like "when you forget a semicolon 🤦♂️ " and get 100,000 followers
my friend from college wrote up about our college town
//crsd.flounder.online/KirksvilleThanks.gmi
this is insane
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB6eY73sLV0
https://twitter.com/_Jana_Marie/status/910761819060531201
One thing I think about in San Francisco is that at any given moment we could be 5 minutes away from an earthquake that causes unprecedented damage to an American city. Really keeps you on your toes
Absolutely incredible when “centrist Democrats” who loses elections in red states say the dems need to move towards the right to win elections in red states. Claire mckaskill loves to do this. Steve bullock did this article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/03/opinion/democrats-rural-america-midterms.html
Like dude you lost your senate race by 10 points. What do you know about winning red states. They ignore the fact that the most left wing senator (sanders) is from an extremely rural state! And easily won red state primaries
Added URL queries to finger.flounder.online:
https://finger.flounder.online/alex@flounder.online
https://finger.flounder.online/plan.cat
We sent a group of british schoolboys to a deserted island in the north Pacific. You won't BELIEVE what happened next!
There is literally nothing I would buy if I made more money. I have extremely inexpensive taste. And yet, I am extremely driven in my career. I’m trying to figure out what motivates that. Ive been trying to focus my life more
Thinking about "The Witness" in how I design tools. The Witness provides basically no explanation to its gameplay, it teaches you through doing. This inspires you to experiment with the game in different ways. I think that technology can be the same way: build it so that the user can experiment with it and gain knowledge about the system.
LOVE THIS LOVE THIS LOVE THIS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmfTTbANBGU
Built a new finger proxy:
https://finger.flounder.online
Have fun, and join the #fingerrevival
thinking of the cowardice when the NFL called super bowl L "super bowl 50"
One of my regrets is that I didn’t take academics more seriously. University is a unique opportunity to pursue ideas relatively freely. Now i have to squeeze in projects outside of my day job
Haven't been to a "really good party" in a long time. Not every party is a really good one.
My philosophy towards the web has been: if you build it, they will come. I don’t need to promote things, or use social media. Just make something that is new, interesting, and mine. As long as there are links to it, someone will stumble upon it. I dedicated a big chunk of the last year to this idea
This is very cool, give it a shot, try going to gemini://flounder.online:
https://cyberspace.baby/amfora/
There is no platform to share interesting things anymore. Only flounder.Online
My spotify wrapped is so terrible i can’t share it with anyone
Set up a patreon. May use it to replace buymeacoffee:
https://www.patreon.com/user?u=3610923
It is completely fucking insane that nuclear weapons exist.
“I mistrust all systematizers and I avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity” - Nietzsche
Nietzsche is an essential atheist. I can’t imagine being an atheist without reading him.
why is this airport playing car seat headrest
Gridposting on ig seems insane these days. There’s no place i would really share anything online anymore. Just here
Wes Anderson’s “Dune”
I’m very interested in Chamath Palihapitiya. I find his politics truly reprehensible, but it seems like he understands things about modern capitalism few people do, kind of like Andrew Yang.
Rewatched the social network recently and i think it’s kind of a bad movie. Like really bad maybe
Reddit is usually bad but this is good
https://www.reddit.com/r/Visiblemending/
In the process of removing all visible logos from my clothing with a thread puller. I recommend also doing this.
income and wealth inequality is a severe social sickness.
thinking of this no longer online blog I read in 2013 that was in the style of like old school "crank" websites.
I don't think I ever saw anything quite this bold online in a long time
Wish there was literally 1 good web framework in rust edit: found one
making my index page more insane
love that jenny odell is basically off social media
wild to me that sarah squirm is on SNL. I remember seeing her do helltrap nightmare at the hideout in chicago like 4 years ago
thinking about the phrase in infinite jest "polyesterishly banal". describes the mood of most of the book
working on my new 5 year plan after my 2 year "pan" (global pandemic)
Thinking about the time I was 15 and got banned from an IRC channel for being insensitive about someone's relationship problems, telling them it's easy to get over a breakup.
When i was in high school i was in Germany on vacation and was on omegle on a laptop i was borrowing and accidentally went to a shock site someone sent me a link to, which was a horrible flashing image of someone with that disease that makes you skin grow excessively so it becomes like these deep scales, and a screeching sound and I couldn’t get it to stop bc it took over my browser and opened like a billion tabs. I force restarted my computer and had unbearable anxiety for weeks and never told anyone bc I was afraid I downloaded a virus
I feel like after I came back from new york I got out of this rut I've been in, this freedom to determine my life.
Having a billion dollars is like having the one ring
cool gemini server
https://git.omarpolo.com/gmid/about/
I’m interested primarily in encyclopedic novels.
A big reason people are alienated is because we have enormous freedom in consumption but almost none in labor.
The most valuable single physical thing I own is a piece of paper with a bitcoin private key on it. by a wide margin.
I hate money.
more moderation in consumption, less moderation in creation
I support this:
it's wild to me that for the world's fair san francisco created an island.
only recently learned that landfill and land fill are different things and its not like parts of chicago are built on trash
This is so cool
https://neartalk.makeworld.space/
In middle school, our school competed in this absolutely insane challenge where basically a bunch of schools competed to solve as many captchas as possible. At one point, our school was briefly in the top 10. I cannot remember what the reward was, but we were all extremely enthusiastic about it.
This is a really good human interest story
despite me believing bitcoin to be an absurd scam, I keep making money from investments I make "as a joke"
I think that if I had $100 million there is nothing I would purchase that I don't own already
For $1,000 I can start a scholarship at my alma mater
When i was in college i lived an essentially moneyless existence. I went to an inexpensive state school and had a scholarship that covered housing and meals (most years). Total expenses were probably $50 per month, sometimes less. I shared a lot of things and got a lot of things for free. I usually had no income. I wasn’t poor, but i was “outside money”
When I was at debate camp in high school one of the teachers had a case that argued that in a moral conundrum with two bad but nonequivalent choices, the right thing to do is choose randomly, ie in the context of the trolly problem, one should flip a coin. When I was in college, I was in a fiction workshop, one of my favorite courses I took. When i was 10ish i had a very large birth mark removed from my cheek and no one has noticed the scar except people I have pointed it out. When I was in 2nd and 3rd grade, I went to speech therapy because I said "S"s like "Sh". I still do this to a lesser degree but no one notices. For a year in Chicago (2016) me and my roommates never locked our back door. When I was 8, I got a neopets account and had my parents actually fill out a form saying that I was OK to use neopets even though I'm under 13. Once my ex-gf's friend lied about being friends with Grimes and Ariana Grande. In college I gave this guy in my CS class a pirated Deadmau5 beat pack, now he is a musician with 2 million tiktok followers. Once one of my coworkers gave me a ticket to see I think baroness and I was too depressed and didn't go -- sad. I still have gym shorts that I wore in high school. There’s a video of me on twitch saying to buy Bitcoin in 2014
https://simplifier.neocities.org/
Video about how to pronounce can and can’t in conversational English. Fascinating.
ICE set up a fake University to basically entrap foreign students
Orange site found my Gemini article:
A fun site I found from the Flounder referral logs. Submitted my personal site here a long time ago.
Enjoyed this talk by jenny odell
Article about Facebook and radicalization
Another flounder-esque service
New Yorker article about growing up in San Francisco in the 70s
Fiona Apple cover of pure imagination
Women pioneered computer programming. Then men took their industry over.
I stopped washing my hair with shampoo and now it has a bit of curl to it. My parents refer to San Francisco as “the city”. It’s wild how many people I see at the laundromat who also use ikea bags as laundry bags. I haven't seen a single MAGA hat since moving to the bay area. Saw maybe 4-5 in my 4 years in Chicago. Used to drink hot green tea in Chicago, but in San Francisco I never feel like it's cold enough to want a hot beverage -- I drink iced tea. Someone was walking on Valencia Street with a speaker playing Hasan Piker’s Twitch stream Purple is an important color in my career. My university and two of the three jobs I've had since graduation have purple logos.
Rewatching clips of Silicon Valley on YouTube and realizing nearly all their costumes are from American Apparel
Wish I was in email communication with more people
mailto:alex@alexwennerberg.com
One of the US women’s olympic skateboarders got 4th place and lost exclusively to kids half her age. She is 34 and has a master’s degree in architecture. Chop suey by System of a Down has 1 billion views on YouTube. The CIA world factbook uses a different definition of “area” for China and the US to make the US definitionally larger. Learned that will.i.am named himself after the main character from green eggs and ham, sam-I-am. The co-star astrology app is written in Haskell. Probably the most popular consumer app written in Haskell. (unverified). Learned there is an artist with 12 million spotify plays named "Ritt Momney". Hawaii has the highest proportion of mormons of any US state that doesn't border Utah
I've had more caffeine this week than any week prior in my life. I keep falling asleep to podcasts. I think I'm slightly withdrawing from caffeine after having ~100mg a day for the last 10 ish days and not having any today. Offices are too cold. They are kept at 70 degrees, instead of a more ideal 75. The cartilage in my left ear above my earlobe is shaped in a way that earbuds often don't fit very well, especially Apple earbuds. My apartment window faces East, and gets a ton of sun in the morning, and I've been waking up with the sun. Sunrise in San Francisco is currently 5:52 AM, I've been waking up between 6:00 and 6:30. I had my phone on black and white mode for almost a week and when I turned it back to color, the colors seemed impossibly vibrant.
Some sort of unity, some form of "monism": this faith suffices to give man a deep feeling of standing in the context of, and being dependent on, some whole that is infinitely superior to him, and he sees himself as a mode of the deity.--- "The well-being of the universal demands the devotion of the individual" -- but behold, there is no such universal! At bottom, man has lost faith in his own value when no infinitely valuable whole works through him, i.e., conceived such a whole in order to believe in his own value.
Nietzsche, "The Will to Power"
The "predominance of suffering over pleasure" or the opposite (hedonism): these two doctrines are already signposts to nihilism. For in both of these cases no ultimate meaning is posited except the appearance of pleasure or displeasure. But that is how a kind of man speaks that no longer dares to posit a will, a purpose, a meaning: for any healthier kind of man the value of life is certainly not measured by the standard of these trifles. And suffering might predominate, and in spite of that a powerful will might exist, a Yes to life, a need for this predominance
Nietzsche, "The Will to Power"
I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation.
Nietzsche, "The Gay Science"
Person on Valencia Street held up a copy of Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil” and asked me if I’ve read “the forbidden book”
People think of technology as computers but technology is also like growing new breeds of apples. Love when musicians don’t have social media.
Interested in the Islamic practice of memorizing the Quran. “The Quran is perhaps the only book, religious or secular, that has been memorized completely by millions of people.” (Wikipedia)
I always find it funny when I am reminded that it is Centers for Disease Control, not Center for Disease Control.
If I hear or see an ad for something I assume it’s a bad product.
Lost $800 investing in Gamestop stock. Read about "one bag" traveling on reddit, and its more extreme form, "zero bag" traveling.
One time I put the first page of Ulysses into Grammarly to see how it reacted. It didn't like the adverbs.
Once heard a quote from a mathematician that said the joy of mathematics is comparable to the joy of sex
Watched an hour and a half interview with a Catholic nun who is my age
From a 2014 interview with Bernie Sanders:
“What’s this fennel?” Sanders inquires as he points to the Crossroads Farm roasted-tomato-and-fennel soup on the menu. [...] “Is it a seed? Is it an herb?”
Several years ago I read on his "Q&A" page that the guy who made this "History of Japan" video (which I've seen probably at least 100 times) said he had no friends and spends all his time on creative projects and nothing else.
https://www.youtube.com/watch/Mh5LY4Mz15o
Got a wonderful email from a lawyer who lives in South Berkeley saying he found my chapbook and sent an excerpt in a daily newsletter they have at the firm where they send a poem a day.
Very stylish woman sitting cross legged on the bench
Woman sitting on the edge of the bench with unwavering perfect posture
Woman doing a “Where’s Waldo?” puzzle
Woman stroking the chest of her bf while he talks about internal hiring politics at his job
Woman holding a bearded dragon
Man in a T shirt that said “FUCK YOUR VACATION” gave me a covid elbow bump and told me to enjoy my vacation
Woman complimented my Mitski “BURY ME AT MAKE OUT CREEK “ t shirt
Group of dancers doing a very difficult dance routine to a shy audience between two stops on the L train. They Got $4 from it.
