michael-dean-k/

I did not expect to be able quote whole scenes of The Sandlot (1993) from memory, but there I was, the annoying co-watcher to my wife who barely remembers it. I must have watched it a dozen times. If not, the few viewings of it must have been a religious, formative experience. Somehow it came on, via streaming, already more than half way through, but early enough to be inside of the dream of Benny Rodriguez¹ where the ghost of Babe Ruth delivers his classic line: “Remember kid, there's heroes and there's legends. Heroes get remembered, but legends never die.”

Did this quote shape my elementary consciousness? Many of my essays here are about “textural immortality” and legacy—doesn’t that word have a shared root with legend? Has my drive to devote my life to creating something memorable (something that outlasts me and shapes the future) a product of a 1990s cult film with a $7 million budget?

Obviously the answers to those questions are lost; all that is left are fuzzy caricatures to reason with. I can’t know exactly the evolution of my psyche, but it does seem that in almost every phase—from baseball, to music, to architecture, to technology—there was this boyish desire to be Ruth-like, to master and transcend a genre, to have a bunch of goofy nicknames, to have leagues of kids yell my name in unison, and to be remember beyond my life. To lean into and live by that line is to become a megalomaniac.

There is a second half to that quote (which is less memorable): “Follow your heart, kid, you’ll never go wrong.” This disarms the grandiosity of the prior line. The goal is not to become a legend for legend’s sake, but to be attuned toward your heart (towards “the way,” nature’s order, the virtuous thing, the hard thing) which puts you on a path, perhaps towards doing legendary things, but the path is the point.

The other day I was listening to a podcast and noted “the purpose of life is the transmission of legacy.” The context is that in the face of death, we strive for immortality in different ways. The immature and impossible version of this is physical immortality. Religions promise spiritual immortality. Pharaohs and estates focus on material immortality. They referred to another option, “secular immortality,” which I’d rather call “symbolic immortality.” This is about living into the future through art, language, and symbols. This can be more modest than the cultural immortality of Babe Ruth; this can exist solely within the family. I’m talking about the paintings we have hung up of my wife’s grandmother, and the sayings from my great grandmother that I’ll pass down (“be your own person, choose your friends wisely”).

There are two ways to think about death. The first is cosmic deflation, to realize that Babe Ruth, the entire culture he's within, and even the species itself, are all just a temporary evolutionary blip; if everything will be cosmically forgotten, then it’s futile to strive to be remembered for anything. Alternatively, you could see your immediate chain, the generations before and after you, as equal to yourself, to see the whole lot of you as a single entity, and to act in a way that could be exemplary for your kids.

Funny to think that Stranger things is a mirror of modern parenting paranoia: if you let your kids ride around on bikes outside, they will be abducted by horrific interdimensional monsters who are controlled by an MK ultra experiment gone wrong (a telepathic reptilian Jeffery Epstein), so just stay safe, stay inside, and watch Netflix.

I had a horrific dream last night. We were in an oversized living room, and there was an inter-dimensional parasite that would one-by-one, burrow into each person’s ass. Whether you then exploded or not was somehow a testament to your character. It went up mine at least twice. I survived, and the second time the parasite coiled up and turned into an egg. I think I won this tournment? Was this a Harry Potter dream? Actually no, this thing was slimey and shadowy and probably from the Stranger Things univese. Actually, I probably had this dream because Season 5 of Stranger Things just dropped.

Stranger Things features possessions, ghosts, monsters, and every breed of supernatural evil, but all packaged in a way to be maximally accessible. It is a cultural juggernaut, the beast of Netflix. It gets billions of views, and is the #1 show in 90 countries. It is cross-generational and nostalgic for both kids and parents, resurrecting songs from the 80s back onto the billboards.

Is it weird that a hit show normalizes paranormal and grotesque violence? I mean yes, in the end, I’m sure the kids will win, but are we not poisoning our subconscious? I guess this reflect a general hesitation to the whole genre of horror. I do think there is something valuable to virgin eyes—if you see CGI evil, even once, it could haunt you eternally. Many other cultures see Halloween as soul-damning (my sister-in-law, a true Orthodox Christian, recently went upstate to visit a monastery on the night of Halloween, to avoid the inevitable images of teenagers dressed as cadavers).

I had a dream last night that involved several adventures with CansaFis Foote (who in this reality wore a backwards baseball hat). Most of them were trivial, like how he said he was going to order a Baha bowl but then told the waiter he wanted three tacos, and then I ate at all the chips when he went to the bathroom. Also his wife was some NYC executive who was about to become the president of my wife’s architecture company. But the best detail was when I saw a poster for the movie Point Break (1989), and I was inspecting it to see who the actors were. Was it Gary Busey and Anthony Keidis, like CansaFis insisted? Was this poster special for omitting the lead actor, Keanu Reeves? One way or another, this triggered lucidity, because we were sitting on a bench and I was describing how “I know we’re in a dream,” and “at any moment now, all of reality is going to wobble and collapse and I’m going to wake up” (as it usually does when I become lucid). But then nothing happened… Yet now I get it; I get why after asking CFF why Keanu Reeves wasn’t in his description of Point Break, he said, “because I’m dangerous.”

I'm ashamed to admit that a meme on Sora got me to laugh and cry so hard that my head was in pain and I had to close the app. It was Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech,” but AI replaced the text with the script from the meme of that 4-year-old who can’t describe his dream (“Have you ever had a dream that you, um, you had, your, you— you could, you’ll do, you— you want, you, you could do…” etc.). There is something about seeing a great American orator mumble endlessly that I apparently can’t handle. Technically, I “made” this meme, which makes it worse, like I’m laughing at my own jokes.

What makes Sora an incredibly weird experiment is that, in 10 seconds, anyone can upload their “likeness.” Basically, you spin your head around, you say some words, and you get a photorealistic avatar that you can lend to your friends so they can prompt you into absurd situations. Of course, Sam Altman is one of the default avatars available. 50% of the app is Sam Altman fan fiction. You will find him stealing graphics cards from Target, smoking weed and saying “we’re cooked,” debating Cartman in court, using Pikachu to power a fusion reactor, etc. Also if you like Pikachu, there is now infinite Pikachu content. It is all very dumb, but it is endlessly novel.

This feels like a preview of a culture who only communicates through Superbowl commercial skits. I hope it doesn’t work, but I fear it might. I assume most people are questioning “why would anybody make their likeness public?” The answer is attention. I imagine that, within a week or two, Sam will have the montages and metrics to sway influencers and celebrities. It will be pitched as the new way to engage your audience: “let them create through you.” They know they can’t use the likeness of real people; I wonder if the point of this app (a wrapper over their underlying video model) is to get people to hand over their identity for free.

I am debating if I should delete this from my phone (I don’t allow any feeds on my phone … except Substack), or, if I should lean in, sell my likeness, and write about the consequences. This feels like an essay-worthy moment, but I can’t find the terms and conditions, and I get paranoid when I imagine the possibilities.

Imagine a concept called "Angels in the Outfield" (named after the movie), an AI-powered “fantasy league” that is more popular than living baseball. You could assemble the best all-time players for each team (ie: all-time Mets roster), and then run simulated seasons each year. You could already achieve something like this through any MLB video game; but to make it good, it would require more than accurate statistics, mechanics, and hyper-realistic graphics, but personality recreations of each player (ie: a convincing first base conversation between Pete Alonso and Joe DiMaggio would be part of the uncanny fascination).

Imagine having the worst thing you’ve ever done broadcasted to the entire world? Everyone would assume that lapse in virtue was your full self. Everyone has a different mean and a different range, but the question is, where does this particular cheater—the CEO at the Coldplay concert—stand? We see this 10 second clip with no context into who he actually is, and we assume it’s representative of his whole character. But when I hear that his wife who was cheated on was actually the mistress from his first marriage, it points to a pattern. Still, who knows if it’s true or not. The situation is something like a perfect storm for a man who probably deserves it. Out of millions of Jumbotron kiss cam moments, all the wrong moves happened at the same time. They could’ve separated when the kiss cam was announced, they could’ve played off the reaction instead of devolving into horrific embarrassment, and Chris Martin could have held his tongue, but none of that happened, and so now an angry public—one looking for a scapegoat—found a powerful man in a cartoon situation, getting the fate we think he deserves.

The Darth Vader x hip hop crossover is a good example of fan-led genre breeding that’s about to explode. Something like Star Wars can be bred with, effectively, anything: baseball, jam bands, New York City, whatever. The question is which hybrids can sustain an audience for more than a single short? Will someone build an empire off of an unexpected but perfect hybrid? (I think there’s potential in GTA meets Mario)

Snorp started as a statue inside of a children’s hospital waiting from in 2016, evolved into an Internet meme in 2017, an now in 2025 it resurrected as an AI-generated music video (NSFW/NSFL). This is the future of entertainment: strange, grotesque, ironic, nostalgic, and gross—the kind of thing that could lodge itself easily in your subconscious, the kind of thing you probably shouldn’t watch, the kind of thing that I hesitate to share in my logs but want to make sense of. (EDIT: Link removed, so linking here to a Google video search for "snorp music video")