michael-dean-k/

1. As a writer needs a site of one's own, a place designed for their particular psychology so they can be the most prolific, honest, adventurous version of themselves. Solitude is important. Montaigne, the founder of the essay, wrote up in his tower for a decade. When you are your own audience, your practice is self-justifying. You are intrinsically fulfilled, and do it regardless of validation, growth, or revenue. To become self-validating is to become a nuclear engine of creativity. When you write on your own site, chances are you will spend much time on ideas that no one will read. That's inefficient, but essays are inefficient. I need to ruthlessly follow what matters to me, with no fear of being illegible or invisible to others.
2. That said, you can and should invite others into your garage. I still plan to keep my Substack and post there, but it will be more like a newsletter, a digest of the controlled explosions happening in my own neighborhood. I do believe in the value, even, the responsibility, of writing in public. By making your place tidy enough for friends, strangers, students, customers, mentors, heroes, whoever, to come in, it makes you put an extra oomph in your crafting of language, and it creates seeds from which relationships can grow. When you have visitors in your territory, they play by your own rules, so you're generally safe from mobs and barbarians. They will not trample over your furniture and throw the books from your shelf like they would in the town square.
3. In 2023, I was hopeful that Substack could be an all-in-one platform—a website/newsletter/discovery engine—but it has heavily shifted into an app-centric social media platform. The app starts you off in an endless, algorithmic, engagement-ranked feed, and the design has slowly evolved to trap you in the app. When you click in article, the default URL is the Substack one. When you click into a person, you can't even go to their site anymore; you can only view them through their profile template. This means all the customization and self-archiving and mythologizing that goes into your site is off limits to the app, the thing they're trying to corrall attention through.
4. I'm very allergic to "Substack is dead" posts, and most of the critique is often a projection of their own weaknesses (ie: when people naturally stop growing, it's easy to blame the algorithm than to take responsibility for it). In my case, the Substack algorithm has worked pretty well over the last two years, and I'd be stupid to abandon it. But the whole system has limited my intrinsic passion to write, and that matters more, enough that I'm willing to take the risk with a split publishing system: Substack newsletters that link out to my site.
5. Back in 2020, a Write of Passage concept was the "public to private bridge," meaning you find people in social media feeds, but then redirect them back to a place of your own. Now that Substack is mostly a social media network, I think that same strategy applies. It's not where I want to host my essays anymore. I'll host newsletters and paid content there, but the timeless stuff wants to live in a place that is timeless.
6. If you have a portfolio of writing, Substack feels like a pretty bad way to make your old work legible, especially within the app. There are no tags or sections. No about page. No navigation system. No ability to frame call to actions as visually dominant. The beauty of your website, especially if you build it from local markdown files, is (1) you have a single source of truth for all your writing, and (2) you can just respawn new interface and navigation systems as your portfolio evolves.
7. Even though Substack lets you export your essays, it's really more like a failsafe, a backup incase you ever decide to leave. Of course, it's very nice to have that! But it's still a cloud-based system, where editing your past files is slow and clunky, and you have limited ability to point your essays elsewhere. When I have a local folder of my essays, I can very easily spin up a stylized website around any essay, or any group of essays (say, for example, if I'm making a proposal and I want to curate a handful of essays. I can point my AI at any combination of files and folders for context.

You’re Ideas Don’t Matter? This take always irks me, though I do love the closing line: "You can [...] spend your life [fighting over] golden eggs [...], or you can learn how to become a goose who lays golden eggs." I love the abundance mindset; just be prolific.

But I don't love the "fuck originality" attitude. It feels like a node in the creativity-for-beginners canon—along with The Taste Gap and All You Need is Vibes—a consolation to prevent a new artist from quitting. And I suppose that is worthwhile. You can't be terribly concerned with technique or originality if you don't have momentum, the general contours of a practice.

But to say that creativity is only "remixing, rearranging, reimagining, and recombining" is to plant a meme that can constrict creativity long past its usefulness. I don't totally disagree—yes, all ideas have a lineage of influence, and most big ideas are reframes of old ones for a new context—but the issue is in being too conscious about it. To see creativity as the controlled combination of elements is to see the creative process like a mechanical assembly line. It ushers in factoid harvesting and Frankenstein stitching. This kind of recycling is halmark slop, the kind of thing that LLMs do.

And again, that is totally fine for L1 or L2 or whatever, but the goal—or at least, my goal—is to transcend that. Originality isn't an old virtue to shed, it's the thing to strive for. It takes a lifetime to get there, decades of dedication, and that is a hard promise to make to a reader who has a time horizon of next week. But what is it that you should strive for if not originality? Instead of combining ideas in an A+B=C kind of way, you want to melt and fuse them all in your subconscious, in an unpredictable, high-voltage kind of way, to create an output that is incalculable, one that of course has nods to works from before it, but one without a formula, and one that could have only been crafted from your own mind. Is originality not the same thing as make the thing that only you can make?

In response to Alex's post here (it is neat that we can go back and forth with two independent sites) ... I also find myself using "you" a lot when I'm writing for myself.

My guess as to why this happens is that a person isn't really a static singular self. Of course we know on some level that we all evolve and change through life. But writing is something that accelerates the sharding, forking, splitting, becoming. When I write "you shouldn't check your email when you wake up" (which I did today), it's as if the person who realizes this (me, now) is different from the person from an hour ago who did not. How could that person lack the clarity and values that present me has?! And so the writer, "the I" of the moment, is something like a parental superego that emerges to steer/synchronize the past/future self. The writer is an insight implementation personality.

There's probably also something to "you" being more abstract and generalizable. Even though personal and relatable grounded writing is anchored in "I," the I also acts as a a blinder, only seeing from a limited, narrow vantage point. And so you can levitate above yourself to see the "yous" and "wes" and how this thing you need to internalize is actually a general principle that anyone could ingest. A "you" is more abstractable.

(...I can still recall this moment in my childhood home, maybe at 18 years old, slightly high, where I remembered, deep in the pantry, that I wasn't thinking, but watching myself think. And maybe that dissociative power of weed is what enables/unlocks abstract thinking...)

The irony here is that this inverts traditional advice. If you're writing personal essays with an audience in mind, the tip is "no second person sermons!" (as in, don't use "you" because it's preachy and it infers that you are lecturing and therefore above your audience). I get that. But when I write purely for myself, I find myself using "you" all the time.

If I really am I collection of selves, then shouldn't I write to myself in "we"? Was Smeagol/Gollum onto something? This is the logical extension of my whole theory above, and that makes me question it. It feels wrong. It also points to the Pessoa/Jung divide. Pessoa saw himself as a cabinet of 70 pseudonyms, each with their own personality and literary voice and fictional backstory. Jung's main concept was "individuation" that all the selves should strive to integrate into a single higher Self, a unified personality.

What if I framed it as, "I won't check email in the morning anymore"? Is this preferable? Does framing it in "I" mean that the current you is the same you that sinned not long ago? Does this framing require you to take responsibility? And so is that act of framing the past self as a "you" actually an act of avoiding responsibility? Was Pessoa just a shifty bastard, a brilliant coward to not be emulated?

Something about hyper-logging (capturing your mind in prose) feels desacralized when I see it as the grown-up development/extension of my AIM bio, or my original Facebook bio (which had a whole series of categories, like favorite movies, books, etc.). Why keep an extremely detailed and public log of my self and thoughts? I guess I see it like a change log of my evolving identity. That was sort of Montaigne's whole thing (perpetually in transit). I imagine the norm is to burrow into your shell of self for as long as possible, to avoid the confusion of drift, but I try to harbor a non-static self. I feel a cringe in sharing this self-congratulations. There's the tension.

I think I'm doing an irregular thing by obsessively documenting thoughts, and from my own perspective it does feel like I'm continuously evolving, but an outer perspective might see this as nothing more than a frivolous blog. It's likely that my whole arc is illegible. Some degree of it comes to surface, like my ever-shifting "career," but most of how any of us feel, think, and change is illegible to each other, except in extreme rare cases of friendship, and so the more idiosyncratic your path, the less anyone can understand you.

I suppose my logs could function as a private journal, but it would lose an important quality. While, there are some consequences of writing in public (a subtle self-censorship), there's something more important you gain: the stakes of knowing that your work could be read in the future, if not by a friend or stranger, then at least a future version of yourself. Whoever it is, if they care to spend the time to read, they would understand you more than probably anyone in your life. That slight pressure snaps me into a mode where I try to be coherent, articulate, and sometimes expressive. When I look back at my old chicken scratch journals, I almost always skim and skip and hate it. But when there's a slight care in crafting the language of my thoughts, it becomes something that outlives the moment.

And so if public writing comes with self-censorship, and private writing comes with a lack of stakes, then the way to go is semi-public publishing. It gives you both freedom and stakes. You won't grow your audience this way, but I think you will forge a sense of self and voice that you can bring with you when you try to build an audience, but that's really secondary. It's the self and voice that matters.

I have some neat prototypes for a personal website, but now I actually want to build a stable backend, one that can serve me for 5-10 years, or more (100-year hosting would be ideal), and persist among many different UI or platform changes. This means I’m trying to think forward to where the Internet could be by then. This involves extrapolating a current trend to its extremes, and even if you don’t know for sure it will happen, it’s good to have comfort in knowing you’re protected from extreme edge cases.

The one top of mind is the death of the open Internet. This goes way further than “the dead Internet theory” which only covers the proliferation of bots and slop. This is about bad actors being so leveraged that it becomes dangerous to have any public content of yourself, in text, image, video, or audio. ie: Any hacker or frenemy can clone you and do what they will. Or maybe a rogue government can analyze your psyche and determine your "loyalty score" is only 35% and shadow ban you from getting a mortgage. I will not get into specifics here of the likelihood of different cloning, phishing, or surveillance schemes, because all that does little but bring you to madness, but my point is that if you want your website to be a 5 million word 1:1 representation of your mind (in all it's vulnerability), it's worth designing for the most paranoid future possible (like how engineers design bridges for earthquakes that will likely never happen).

One response to all this is cyber-defense. At the absolute minimum, this means locking most things behind a gate where only the approved can get through. A more clever, technical solution is to share encrypted “coordinates” that represent the semantic nature of an essay, and then let people surf through prompting and approval gates. An even more extreme idea is a mostly-private site with a kill switch, which involves (a) signing in once per month to mark "I'm alive," and also (b) giving my wife a secret key to type in when I die, which then releases all private material. Obviously this throttles reach, but isn’t there psychological value to limiting your audience anyway? Montaigne wrote alone in a tower for a decade, and so if the approach is to use writing to steer you life and mind, at the detriment of audience growth, then this might be the way to go: a literary labyrinth accessible to maybe your 30 closest friends and anyone else via application who can prove they are not a ghoul.

The other alternative is to embrace the weirdness, that no matter what, we will all be rendered through a schizophrenia filter, with no choice but to relinquish control over the non-canonical or rogue versions of ourselves.

For the last two years my lock screen clock has been set to Khmer, the language of Cambodia, with numerals I (still) can’t parse. The point is to not poison the flow of my day with chronos.

I started this experiment because I realized how obsessively I would check the time, as soon as I woke up, through morning and evenings and weekends for no real reason, in situations among friends where the hour was irrelevant. Time was a commodity, something to budget, forecast, control. Only when I got off the clocks did I notice a whole layer of quiet, instant calculations I’d perform to steer the immediate future (ie: it’s 9:43pm, which means I have 17 minutes until 10pm, which means I can only do 15-minute things until the 10pm-things start to happen). Chronological time alienates you from kairos, the ripeness of any given moment.

If we pick up our phone 96 times per day (the average), then we’re aware of the time every 10 minutes. We’re a society stuck in time. Lewis Mumford said that the clock (not the steam engine) is the central machine of the Industrial age, the thing that dissociates us from our natural rhythms.

Of course if I have back-to-back meetings or multiple trains to catch, then I need to be in manager mode and know time to the minute; but in all other moments, I strive to be temporally oblivious. I don’t know the time right now. I assume it’s somewhere 8-9am, and when Christine rings the doorbell I’ll assume it’s almost noon, and I’ll look outside to see the sun and shadows to confirm it’s no longer morning. When I’m hungry I’ll go eat, but unfortunately that brings me near the stove clock which breaks the spell (I’ve tried scrambling the stove clock, and that obviously annoys my wife). Whenever possible I default to removing clocks from UIs, or turning them to analog to create a second of friction, or, when iOS forces me to see ##:##, I revert to foreign numerals I can’t comprehend. Not every room in your home needs a clock. You should never know the time in the room you write.

Good voice is writing that's unchained from a single register. This is why default AI sounds so robotic: even if you prompt it with the precise style you want, it applies the same approach to every single sentence to make a monotonous caricature. No matter what it is, it’s numbingly uniform.

I find that if a writer gets caught in any register (only hilarious, only referencing Aristotle, only confessing terrible things, every sentence is a metaphor), it becomes annoying and unbelievable. We probably all have our default register. I get annoyed when I catch myself stuck in an analytical register. People don’t act like this IRL. People are 75-sided and context dependent.

As a writer skirts over different objects of focus, the tone should alternate between opposite modes: certainty and doubt, anger and love, approachability and authority, active voice and passive voice. There’s obviously no single tone that’s better than any other, but adaptive tone is better (=more organic) than drone tone. 

Organic voice is, I think, one of the halmarks of the essay. While other genres are locked into specific registers (research papers are certain, neutral, and authoritative, with terrible passive constructions to capture every nuance), essays are exciting because they capture the multitudes of expression.

I've always thought 'writing shows you what you think and editing helps you change your mind'—and maybe that’s a decent heuristic—but it’s more complicated than that. I think it’s possible for writing to do the opposite of what we hope, to lead to self-deception. A few thoughts on how:

1. Premature convergence: When you start drafting, you unlock a new stream of thoughts, but once you find a new center of gravity (a potential thesis), it’s common for all further thoughts to reinforce the thing you happened to stumble on, regardless of its substance. Beyond a point, writing can ossify & lock you into a frame.

2. Aesthetic attachment: Once you’re trying to make a ‘good’ essay around your thesis, it’s easy to become enamored by phrases, sentences, images, and sources. Expression (vibes/voice) is an entirely different thing than thinking. You can dress up a static/wrong thought to be beautiful/persuasive.

3. The sunk cost fallacy: after you spend hours on an essay and share it, it’s likely that you’ll continue to believe it. If you’re wrong, you’ll have ‘wasted’ that time. If you change your mind, your readers will have an outdated model of you (OFC, views evolve over time, but I wonder if publishing leads to short-term friction in your evolution).

One possible way around this is to, as soon as you think you found your thesis, to rigorously consider and explore the antithesis (not as a rhetorical strawman, but to really, earnestly, consider the opposite). It means a given draft will be scatter-brained and contradictory, but it’s how you find a synthesis, a more refined thesis. And once you find that, you start over, and repeat, until you end up somewhere that is far more nuanced, interesting, and weird than where you started.

The thing I’m grasping at is that thinking & expression are often at odds, and before you commit to an idea worth expressing, you need to go through rounds of unglamorous self-interrogation. There is probably a mode where thinking _is_expression, but the risk is not wanting to shed something that is elegantly said. One way through this it to get meta and explicitly express your doubt and your evolving POV; I think this is what separates essays from articles and propaganda, and it stops you from brainwashing yourself.

A few days after my daughter was born, I had something which I’m describing as “phantom infant syndrome.” When I was away from her, holding a phone, or fork, or some other manufactured object, I’d get a tactile hallucination in my hands of the softness of her skin and hair. I imagine this is nature’s way of saying go be with your kid (made possible by mild sleep deprivation). And so this is symbolic of one of the many biological drives pulling me away from writing in recent weeks.

This is happening around my five year anniversary of being online, and it’s probably the longest stretch I’ve gone without having urgency to do so. It’s probably healthy and helpful to be relatively non-linguistic for a few weeks, once in a while (I usually write on vacations, so I never really take breaks from it). We’ll see. It’s possible that I’ve thought myself into a trench, and the best way forward is a proper break (I have once said the best editors are friends, time, and weed—although less weed in recent years). Now that I’m immersed, familiar, and comfortable with the rigamarole of infant care (and all the wonder it brings, too), I feel bandwidth opening to write, and I’m curious to see how my practice takes shape from these new constraints. There are real deadlines now. Baby wakes up in … 30 minutes … and I’d like to post this by then.

Last weekend I read through all my writing from 2025, and after the typical EOY reflections and word count calculations, I realized that something has to change. So I published 12 essays, 10 about Essay Architecture, totaling at ~64k words (re: the other two … one was a first-person TikTok odyssey, the other was about the role of psychedelics in evolution). But I also published 150k words in logs, 2.5x the volume. Logs are notes to myself, mild-epiphanies through the day written in complete sentences, all ghost-posted to a monthly Substack post. Unlike my focused and convergent writings about EA, my logs are far more random: recurring topics included the Grateful Dead, movie reviews, notes from a day at the zoo, dream journal entries, usage debates, new architectures for social media, overheard conversations, etc. My logs, in theory, are a low-stakes breeding ground for essay ideas to emerge, but given the demands of my other projects (the textbook, software, and essay prize), my logs stayed unread and undeveloped last year. Now, with parenting in the mix, it makes sense to me to stop logging, or at least, reconfigure it.

Over 4 year, I wrote +8k logs, added to the archive on 95% of days (avg. 5.6 per day), and the whole archive is 650k words. It’s a very personal corpus, one that documents my thoughts and life at a sometimes OCD-level of detail. I thought I’d do this forever, and it sort of stings to stop. I guess I’m not “stopping” as much as setting a stronger filter: I can still capture whatever I want, but I can only save whatever I publish on Notes. I used to argue for the importance of having a low-visibility space where you can publish whatever you want without self-consciousness or the need to set context with strangers, but maybe that’s a luxury I’ve outgrown. This is perhaps a long-winded way to announce something that probably doesn’t need announcing: expect to get a lot more diddles and spontaneous essays like this in the Feed. I figure my email-essays can be more on topic (I have a few slotted for January re: Essay Architecture, the club, and visual breakdowns), while these can be chaotic.

Technically, I’m still logging, but it’s for my daughter and those are private. Every day I write simple journal entries or letters about what happened. I figure one day, when she’s 15 or so, I’ll just hand over The Files and blow her mind. My dad did this for me: a few years ago, after my nephew was born, he sent me 8k words from my first 4 years. It was uncanny to see that he had a logging impulse too, and to learn about all these small events that everyone in the family would have otherwise forgotten (things that were not captured in pictures, like me trying to brush the teeth of stray cat). All this reminds me that writing isn’t just an act of thinking or communicating, it’s an act of memory.

I’ve been reflecting on how my writing will change once I have a newborn, and I keep coming back to this idea of releasing a “monthly EP of essay demos.” This means that I’ll send a post with 5-10 links to other essays that I “ghost posted” (publish without sending) earlier in the month.

I currently only have the S and L lanes of writing working. Either it’s a 2-minute log or a 20-hour essay. The goal is to prioritize the M (medium) lane, a 2-hour essay; instead of sending them out in real-time, I’ll batch them and let readers click into the topics they want. Feels like a strategy to be more divergent, more experimental, less formal, without overwhelming people and confusing them from the core mission of Essay Architecture.

I had Coco read through a week of my logs, and she shared three patterns she’d want to read more of: (1) unique, vulnerable experiences that show conflict and inner struggle; (2) lens on for self-improvement regarding life or writing; (3) culture commentary that helps make sense of big ideas. She was less interested in technical topics, or hypothetical scenarios (such as trying to imagine the handicap we’d have to give tennis pro Carlos Alcaraz for us to have a competitive match in tennis). The beauty of the EP strategy is that it gives readers a menu, and each will have their preferences.

I want to adopt a three-lane model of writing (and especially as I enter fatherhood, I’m going to have to). An essay can take 2 minutes, 2 hours, or 20 hours. 

• A 2-minute essay is a log; I can do many of those per day. More so than time, those require presence and discipline: the ability to stop in any moment, realize something is happening, and just write it down. If there is enough time for a 2-minute scroll, why not a 2-minute paragraph? 

• Next is the 2-hour essay, something you can start and finish in a single essay. The goal here is to pick “layups,” and I don’t actually mean “pick the easiest idea,” but more like, “pick the one that is fresh and active in your mind, and ready to come out now.” If you haven’t been daydreaming about it throughout the day, it’s probably not the essay you should try and write in a single sitdown. The goal is to publish before leaving the chair. 

• The final essay, the 20-hour essay, should be undertaken much more infrequently. A realistic goal would be to do 4-6 of these next year. Behind the 20 hours of “writing” is maybe another 200 hours of subconscious marinating; the goal here is to start from important, timeless questions in your life—maybe, your “12 favorite problems.”

Being a writer involves stubbornly carving out time from life so that you have the space to reflect on it. You probably miss something if you permanently retreat into your own cave of rumination, but also you miss something if you are just completely immersed in your own stream of experience with no distance to step back and process it. I think logging is that middle ground; when you take field notes from the front lines of life, you have high-res shadows or your experience that you can bring back with you into your Writer’s Cave.

I get the sense that creativity used to be seen as a form of artistic mastery, but in the 1990s, creativity turned into catharsis, therapy, self-help. It’s an “if I don’t do it, I’ll get sick,” attitude. I resonate with that—I often refer to writing as a release valve; without it, my head would get clogged and blow up—but not at the expense of technique!

Mastery is about breaking what you made, trying again, breaking it again, pushing the boundaries, and demanding an answer to “how do I make things?” Once you've made a bunch of things, you start to intuit your limitations, and the question is do you accept or interrogate why.

The process of interrogating is not only hard/heroic, but it’s rewarding in a gentle way. 1) The things you work hard on will be special to you for your whole life. 2) You slowly enhance and develop skills in and out your domain. 3) You build community through working together on hard things. 4) It reframes other elements of your life: pain is a puzzle.

I wonder if there is a Trojan Horse version of sneaking mastery into society through a self-help framework.

What would it look like to write a memoir in real-time? It would require a kind of real-time record keeping and interpretation of my activities, sensory impressions, and emotion. Even the boring moments would come through, stretches of focus on ordinary days before anticipated events. It’s tempting to say I’ll write a personal essay when I go to SF next week, but I should assume there will be no time in coming months to focus deeply on a piece of longform literary writing. The memoir is live. Prose has to happen in the moment, instantly crystallizing. My notes have not been personal. I suppose I fear someone will read them and find themselves in them. Are these risks real? Why not have logs just be the hyperlucid accounts of all conversations, regardless of who is implicated? Even if they cared, over what time frame would they care, and if they do, over what time frame will I care that they cared? All these thoughts are either 1) flimsier than paper, or 2) eternally lodged in the deep memories of an ASI, so not sure if I should loosen up or burrow.

I want to write an essay about how—starting In the 1990s—creativity advice was re-targeted for the mass public, and in the process, it got watered down.

There are three general modes that have become mantras for beginners:

1. ”Art is therapy.” This is found in Julia Cameron’s morning pages and in Stephen Pressfield’s The Resistance. It frames art as self-help, as a kind of therapy. You can’t create because you’re blocked, and once you create, you unblock. This frames the idea that art isn’t about mastery and the struggle and will to attain it, but in feeling good about yourself.

2. “Taste is all you need.” Rick Rubin is associated with this new philosophy that technique doesn’t matter; you just need strong opinions. This is a worldview that is easy to adopt, because everyone likes to believe they have good taste without having to work for it. Now with AI, doing the work won’t matter as much as having the vision for what needs to be done. There’s a weird and unfortunate ethos that craftsmanship is redundant, and all you need to know is good from bad.

3. “Just show up and it gets easier.” I think of Austin Kleon’s Show Your Work—a book that first introduced me to the idea of self-publishing online—which encourages you to just share your process. Keep showing up. It’s a philosophy that’s unique to the digital age where anyone can publish, and is probably the origin of David Perell’s Write of Passage too. It is the operating mode of newsletter writers. It helps get started. Paired with this idea is The Taste Gap by Ira Glass, that says the more you work, the closer you get to your heroes (I believe the opposite: the better you get, the better you realize your heroes actually are).

There is truth in all of these, but they are half-truths where their opposites are just as important. If you ignore the forgotten halves (analytical study, craftsmanship, embracing challenge), it might actually hold you back and frustrate you.

I am undecided to the degree that I want to write about cockroaches.

First, obviously, they are skeevy. Roach prose is definitely less gross than a Google images search, but still, it’s far from a feel-good topic. I don’t want to put my readers through thinking about them too much, let alone myself. But I feel intrigued to write about them; there’s the Burroughs-like writerly obsession with roaches in Naked Lunch—which feels like an honestly twisted curiosity that is nothing to aspire to—but it would feel insincere to mimic him. Still, experiences with roaches are uncomfortable and memory piercing and physiology altering and I guess I want to freeze them in text.

I am the exterminator because my landlords are very nonchalant and I wouldn’t be surprised if they just crushed them with their hands (I have seen them do this once, at our lease signing). I have a new habit of applying Indoxicarb near the radiator with a syringe; the theory is that, since they are scavengers, they will grab the bait, bring it back to the nest, and poison their families. I’m skeptical of this. In any case, this my 2nd time finding “roach droppings” under the radiator. Does it immediately expunge everything in their intestines? This time though, I looked at the underside of my Clorox wipe and saw what seemed like a microscopic baby roach, dead or alive I’m not sure, and I couldn’t tell if it’s legs were wiggling so I pinched hard just in case, but now I am in this ethical haze of seeing my self as a roach abortionist.

There is an intimidation in knowing you’ll never read all that you want to read and never write all that you want to write. There are nearby dimensions you could know but won’t. "βίος βραχύς, ἡ δὲ τέχνη μακρή," or "Ars longa," vita brevis," or "Life is short, the art is long." That aphorism was originally by Hippocrates about the practice of medicine, but Chaucer extended it in 1380: "The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne." Those phrases acknowledge the fact, but not the dread or urgency behind it.

06:45 PM – By looking through this thread, you understand where ChatGPT psychosis can come from. It shows the range of ways AI can make people cry, mostly, from being validated. This isn’t inherently bad, but someone who is validation-starved is more likely to put an insane amount of trust in the praise-giver, enough that they’re willing to re-orient their whole world view around it. It’a also able to bring ideas into language in a way that a non-writer can't do on their own.