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Woke up today with typical levels of despair (high). Slept an extra three hours; it did nothing to help. Realized I would have to get through this the hard way. Read for a few hours at the cafe across the street (just opened), then went for a run which became a walk which became a run again. Text messages to a friend:

yeah i went for a run and then kinda walked at the end of the run down to DATA_EXPUNGED

Documentary lady

The lady in front of me on this flight is watching a truly infohazardous documentary on her phone about some mom whose teenage daughter got pulled into an online trafficking ring—one of those extremely rare and awful “stereotypical” predator stories that keeps parents up at night because it’s just so vivid and horrible. Have been mentally playing the Jason Isbell song “Save the World” for about an hour, that awkward guitar riff perhaps a picture of our own powerlessness over the inevitable march of time. Pedo documentary lady reminds me that I am not the only one despairing, as if that’s any comfort.

Last girl in class

Have to tell this story in a very boring way to remove identifying details.

In college, I took a class in a subject that was of far greater interest to boys than girls. On day one of the class, there was only one girl in the class of about fifteen, and she seemed very shy. However, a round of introductions revealed that she was actually planning to minor in this subject (for which the class was a core requirement), and thus although it was awkward to have such a skewed gender ratio, I think the general mood was to be “cautiously optimistic” that there was a brave woman in the room. We were all progressive, young types who wanted (to some extent or another) to see gender roles shaken up, right?

Sorry, guys

I was at the edge of insanity and took a week off to exist in the real world. I wrote a bunch of random notes on my phone over the past week and will be uploading a few with today’s date as posts. Sorry for flooding your feed, and stay aloha.

This is what CS majors actually believe

Thomas Hunter II: AI will change the world but not in the way you think

I have nothing huge to say about this. The argument is familiar, about how LLMs are just wasted effort because they insert a translation layer between my “write an email with these bullets” and your “summarize this email in bullets.” But what jumped out to me from Mr. II’s post was this aside, which is shockingly dismissive of humanities education:

Mostly dead

This week was possibly the biggest week I’ve had at work, and also possibly some of the worst sleep, caused less by the raw lack of time from so much work and more by the associated stress and anxiety. And also the knock-on effects of the coffee fuckup.

Basically, I’m working with an all-star team that’s been called in to handle a nearly impossible task, and we have put together a plan of action that can work, but only if we execute it flawlessly—there’s little room for error. Because the team is so energetic—truly, some of my favorite people to work with—I feel a tremendous sense of pride and duty to do my best for my peers and demonstrate that I “belong” with them, and that’s where the stress comes in: waking up randomly at like, 1 a.m. thinking: Am I doing enough? Am I pulling my weight?

Starbreaker’s “A Masculine Mystique”

Was catching up on starbreaker.org (he frequents the 32-Bit Cafe) and found this post of his from last year entitled “A Masculine Mystique.” It gives the “rules of masculinity” as the author has experienced them. Almost all of them ring true to my experience, too, but the one that jumped out for me was this one:

A man will perform unacknowledged emotional labor that women will not be willing or able to understand, accept, or appreciate even if it is explained to them, while being accused of expecting the women in his life to shoulder “the mental load”. He will do so in order to refrain from alienating those around him, keeping his true feelings and opinions to himself and denying the urge to lash out in anger as even those closest to him mistreat him without realizing it.

Coffee fuckup

Last night, I was setting up Mr. Coffee and accidentally pressed Brew Now instead of Brew Later, and ended up staring down the barrel of a full pot of coffee at 9 p.m. My girlfriend talked me out of drinking it, but my sleep was already ruined: the tantalizing scent had already found its way to the bedroom, and thoughts of morning kept me up late.

Big dudes crying

As I said a few days ago, Jason Isbell has a mystifying ability to speak to “man pain” and provoke a compassionate response in even the most stoic of listeners. I recently watched an interview (relevant part begins at 8:40) with Desi Lydic on The Daily Show where Jason—yeah,we call him Jason) remarks that he is moved when he sees repressed southern men like him crying at his concerts: “I see a lot of big dudes crying at the shows and it makes me really happy.”

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Getting a little too tight, caring a little too much about things. This was supposed to be my silly zone, and here I am debating colors and the difference between a 1px and 2px border.

Having an easy Saturday. I answered a few emails, did some life admin tasks, and attempted to make plans with neighborhood friend for tomorrow, but it turns out he has some girl over, so I’ll give him a radius.

Internal locus of control

Was talking with a new friend/colleague about strategies for dealing with our male-dominated work environment and we arrived at the insight that those who manage to thrive despite the adversity do so by adopting an internal locus of control.

This is a bold statement, because when you are sitting in a room with a bunch of sexist men who are ignoring you or rolling their eyes, the easiest way to resolve the feeling of frustration and insecurity is to get a “reality check” from someone else in the room who can reassure you that the problem wasn’t you, it was them, those sexist and narrowminded men. And this is an important thing to do, to get validation, but it’s crucial that you don’t stop there, or else you are creating a feedback loop where every time you face adversity, you need to find someone who can reassure you that you are not the problem.

Weathervanes

I’ve been listening to the album Weathervanes today by Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, a brilliant treatment of “man pain,” which of course is one of my favorite topics to consume media about.

I think Jason Isbell might be one of the most brilliant lyricists ever. I’m in awe of the track “Save the World,” which inverts the typical parental dynamic by having the speaker beg his child (in my hearing) for reassurance that she will “save the world when I lose my grip.”

Portrait of a shitty childhood

This short documentary Christmas, Every Day is genuinely one of the most painful things I have seen recently. It’s about a family in Alabama that is raising their pre-teen girls to be social media influencers who post makeup tutorials and dance videos on TikTok to farm engagement and sponsorship dollars.

Perhaps the most disturbing part is the scene where Dad explains the motivation for this parenting choice as setting his girls up with “passive income” so they can “be their own boss” instead of working a normal job—misappropriating the logic of “girlboss” to rationalize a childhood environment that will, without qualification, give them confidence and body image issues for the rest of their life.

Trying hard things

You simply must. It’s good for the soul.

I recently tried watercoloring with my girlfriend. She can actually watercolor. I cannot, never really took to visual art. The experience broke me. I fucked around on an abstract design for maybe an hour then gave up and had to lie down. So tedious, the work of constantly dipping the brush into the paint and trying to maintain a consistent, bold color. When I woke up from my nap, she was still only 10% done, patiently matching colors, filling in details. Utter flow state.

Shame and male sexuality

I recently read a Haruki Murakami novel, namely Norwegian Wood, for the first time in years, and thereby dislodged a painful memory of a family vacation. In middle school, I brought Murakami’s then-new 1Q84 to read on the trip, and at some point when I was out for a swim, my sister and grandmother started leafing through the book. When I returned, they accosted me and demanded to know why I was reading this kind of “pornography.”

Not clicking that

Yesterday two copies of an episode called “Why Dating Sucks for Men” of the Vox podcast Explain It to Me dropped in my podcast feed. Two copies because they also put it in the weekend feed for Today, Explained, which is their daily news podcast.

I’m not clicking that.

That topic is a known infohazard for me. Listening would only make me stressed out and resentful over a problem I don’t even have because I’m not single. But I have experienced enough frustration over the topic in life to know all the arguments and refutations and counter-refutations: there’s no value to me in listening. And yet, that clickbait title …

Can you not

So we’re at this work meeting, right? 22 dudes in the room, 2 gals. Guess which 3 people get hit on. That’s right, the gals, one of them twice.

The especially sucky part of this was that one of two was a woman on our team who we brought into this meeting specifically to be an “expert” on the topic. She had prepped a great set of slides and we’d been doing lots of, basically, confidence-building exercises in rehearsal and seen a lot of improvement in her ability to take charge of the room and respond to tough questions gracefully. But with her underlying confidence issues/imposter syndrome, getting pointlessly hit on at the very start of the meeting (before she even introduced herself) was a needless blow that almost threw her off balance. Thankfully, she pulled it together and delivered a great presentation, but was this a net positive or negative experience for her professional development?

Narcissist in the workplace

I have a worst enemy at work. Thankfully he (it’s always a he) is on a distant team and we never really have to work together. We became enemies a few weeks after he was hired, when he was given a chunk of my code to read just to familiarize himself with what we do, and took it upon himself to call a meeting with me and my various bosses to grill me on a bunch of difficult technical aspects and criticize the notes I’d made for myself as “imprecisely phrased.” I held my own, but it was a waste of time and a humiliating experience.

Sexism, but it's lit crit so it's cool

A few months ago, the magazine The Sun Magazine published a great little story called "Bone Frag" by Peter Stenson.

Lots to love about this story: First of all that it breaks the mold of what you usually see in The Sun, i.e. weepy stories about family, the overturning of generations, and how many obscure plant names the author learned while growing up in Rural Place. (No hate for those stories, but it's been done to death.) "Bone Frag" is about body parts literally falling out of the sky--an absurd metaphor for, you know, all of this (gesturing at 2025 environment). It's a dark comedy, we love a dark comedy.

Judith Butler lecture

Around the time of the 2016 presidential election, can't remember if it was before or after, I saw a Judith Butler lecture in person and and a young white man in the audience asked a question that went something like: "So, it's great all this advocacy you have done on behalf of women and gender minorities and how you have worked in the intersectional framework. I want to do the same thing on behalf of an intersection I think is underserved on the left, namely young white men."

Ruth Whippman on how boys are socialized

Sorry, another gender post today. I just read this commentary from the American Institute for Boys and Men and wanted to share. AIBM is like, the last remnant standing of the men's advocacy that I remember taking great interest in when I was younger, before the men's rights movement dissolved into the alt-right and woke factions.

In the linked article, Whippman is promoting her book and shares five tacit assumptions of past gender equality activism that she overturned as she raised boys. The quote I wanted to share is this one:

Don't fuckin touch me

In the five love languages quiz I always get physical touch. I'm a big physical touch person. I like hugs, kisses, and sex when I like them.

That does not mean I want those things from every stranger. In fact, it means I am especially sensitive to physical contact when it is forced on me.

I met today a friend of a friend for the first time and she kept trying to do all these consolatory touch things. You know, because I was doing the ironic millennial thing of making jokes about being so anxious I could vibrate myself off a cliff at any moment and being fugly and so on, and she was of the more toxic positivity/post-gender/post-sexuality vibe, so when I said something self deprecating, instead of getting the joke or being like "same" (the correct millennial response) she would like, try to touch me on the shoulder? sympathetically?

Privacy nihilism

I have this friend who is like, generally concerned about privacy in the macro but has not taken any actual steps to increase her digital privacy threshold in the micro, e.g. using a fake phone number for grocery store loyalty cards or opting out of pointless data-sharing agreements or rejecting cookies or what have you.

I forget what the example was that we were discussing yesterday but she said something like, "Yeah, it kinda sucks that they use that info to form a digital profile of you, and I would love to opt out, but at the same time it takes effort to do so, and I am quite confident that even if I opted out they could get the same data from somewhere else, so it's really just wasted effort."

Trusting your intuition

I used to be skeptical of people who said that they were good at judging character and could just tell based on vibes if someone was intelligent, narcissistic, a good person to work with, etc. I knew about studies showing that, when the average person tries to judge others on intuition, they end up preferring people who are similar to themselves, hence the meme about white politics bros wanting to work with someone they could "grab a beer with" i.e. another white politics bro.

Male pattern emotional illiteracy

Or MPEI for short. This is a new term I have been trying to make catch on with my friends slash colleagues. It describes so many of the situations we keep finding ourselves in.

As much context as I can provide without giving my literal address away: We work in a very male- and boomer-dominated field. But our immediate team does a special thing that skews younger and female. So we often find ourselves in the awkward role of having to work with another team nominally to provide our team's special thing, but in practice to compensate for the fact that the team has succumbed to MPEI and their relationship with the client is falling apart.

Reddit gender vs. Tumblr gender

You can read a lot about the "gender experience" of people in my microgeneration who grew up reading Reddit vs. those who grew up on Tumblr. The general gist is that Tumblr was/is this super feminist and inclusive space, potentially to a fault due to their rampant cancel culture and random TERF offshoots, whereas Reddit was a genuine cesspool full of MRAs and (whichever was the wrong side of) Gamergate activists and so on.

Something that happened to me twice

According to my therapist's definition of the term, I have been sexually assaulted twice. Don't read the rest of this post if you don't want to think about that.

The first time was when I was 17 or 18 (important difference there but I honestly can't remember) by an old lady. In the moment, I felt very afraid and uncomfortable, and had to threaten to call the cops before she backed off. After a few days, I was fine, I guess. I even felt a little bit vindicated because I had spent a long time feeling frustrated at the idea that only women/girls could be the victims of sexual assault, and now I was living proof that that wasn't the case. Just as soon, I felt extreme doubt about whether what I had experienced was "legitimate," whether I could actually compare my experience to the "real" sexual assaults that we were hearing about then, near the peak of the MeToo movement.

Confessional

Sike! You thought I was going to have a consistent title theme (minimalistic thing with just the date) but now I'm not doing that anymore because I'm writing again today and couldn't decide what to do with that.

I'm trying to start a confessional kind of thing, where people can send me their intrusive thoughts and I can bless them with the reassurance that having a bad thought doesn't make you a bad person. This is important to me because it's an issue I struggle with personally.

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My observation: people make a lot of bad decisions to fulfill a need for validation.

Like dating someone who is a piece of shit, but that's an obvious example.

I see it more often at work: someone wants an exception to policy, and immediately asks the highest-ranking person whose email they have for permission. If you ask for permission, the answer is always going to be no. As long as the thing you are asking for is commonplace and reasonable, just do it and send a heads-up, or something like that. (There's actually a lot of gray area here, because people who want to do something genuinely fucked up also often adopt this "act first" mentality, but you have to just trust your own moral compass--it's the only way.)

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I'm creating this site so I can have a fresh start on the internet.

It's not my first webpage, and it probably won't be my last. But I wanted to experience the feeling of starting from nothing again: plain HTML, writing words off the cuff, not worrying so much about whether I used straight quotes or curly quotes or formatted my code correctly or whatever.

I also wanted to have a site that isn't tied to my real name. I have other sites that are also not tied to my real name; some of them are known to my IRL friends as a bit of a joke, others are truly anonymous. But I have used them mostly for "experiments"--trying to learn a new technology or write in a new format.