March 27, 2026
4:50 pm
working notes
Fragments, field notes, and half-lit thoughts from the textual underground
March 27, 2026
4:49 pm
hello world
March 24, 2026
10:11 am
I’m testing out a custom-built “What’s on your mind?” text box where I can do my post from and then automatically post to my custom post called Notes via the IndieBlocks plugin.
March 23, 2026
5:07 pm
I keep thinking about why the “rewire your brain” language became so dominant. I think it’s because it flatters us. It tells us change is clean and efficient. That it’s a matter of finding the right technique and applying it correctly.
The organic metaphor is less flattering. It says change takes time. It says you can’t control it, only influence it. It says some things need to decompose before new things can grow, and that decomposition is uncomfortable and slow and not something you can optimise your way through.
But the organic metaphor has one advantage the mechanical one doesn’t. It’s true to how change actually happens. And working with truth, even uncomfortable truth, produces results that working with a comfortable fiction never will.
March 21, 2026
9:57 pm
Here be dragon
The old cartographers had a habit worth noticing. When they ran out of known world, when the coastline ended and the sea opened into pure conjecture, they did not leave the map blank. They filled it. Here be dragons. Not emptiness. Not absence. Something living, dangerous, and magnificent waiting at the edge of what they understood.
Most people spend their entire lives inside the known territory.
Not through cowardice, exactly. Through habit. Through the accumulated weight of everything that works well enough, hurts little enough, feels safe enough. The known world is not a bad place to live. It is warm in there. The roads are familiar. You know where things are.
But there is a reason you keep coming back to the edges.
The dragons are not decoration. They are not warnings to stay away. They are markers, cartographic honesty about the fact that here, in this territory, the usual rules do not apply. Here, identity becomes unstable. Here, the stories you tell yourself about who you are and what you are capable of stop being certainties and become questions again. Here, something alive and unresolved is waiting.
This is not a metaphor dressed as adventure. It is a literal description of what happens when you decide to look honestly at the interior life you have been managing, navigating around, optimising the surface of. The edge of the known world is the edge of the self you have agreed to be. The dragons are the material you have not yet faced. The disowned strengths. The unfinished business. The voice that keeps saying there is more than this and the voice that keeps arguing back.
Every tradition that has ever taken the inner life seriously has pointed toward the same thing. Jung called it individuation: the journey toward the whole self, including the parts that have been living in shadow. The Taoists understood that the path does not go around the difficult terrain. It goes through it. The alchemists encoded the whole sequence in symbols: solve et coagula, dissolve and recombine. The story is always the same. You go into the fire. You come back different.
The adventure is not external. It was never external.
The edge of the world is not somewhere you travel to. It is a decision. A decision to stop managing the inner landscape at a safe distance and start actually inhabiting it. To stop negotiating with your own depth and start entering it.
Here be dragons.
That is not a threat. That is an invitation.
Let’s go.
March 18, 2026
4:34 pm
We now have AI tools that can mirror our own narratives back to us with terrifying efficiency. If you ask an LLM to validate your perspective, it will do so. It will help you polish your main character script until it shines.
But if you use AI as an intellectual partner, as a way to find the holes in your thinking, to surface the perspectives you’ve missed, and to challenge your own “stories as code”, then it becomes a tool for expansion rather than isolation.
The danger of romanticising your own life is that you eventually stop living it. You start performing it. You become a spectator of your own experience, constantly checking to see if the lighting is right and if the dialogue sounds profound. You are no longer engaged with the messy, unpredictable, beautiful reality of other people. You are just managing a brand.
Meaning is made, not found. But it is made in the space between us. If you occupy all the space with your own protagonist energy, there is no room for meaning to emerge.
March 18, 2026
9:38 am
Jung understood that the self is not a monolithic “I” that sits at the center of the universe. It is a constellation. When we identify too strongly with the Hero archetype, we inevitably cast everyone else into the role of the Shadow, the Herald, or the Threshold Guardian.
We stop seeing the complexity of the other because our internal narrative requires them to be simple. We need them to fit the role we’ve assigned them so our story remains coherent. It’s a fragile coherence. The moment someone refuses to play their part—the moment a partner expresses a need that doesn’t fit your plot, or a colleague challenges a decision—the main character feels it as a personal violation.
It’s not just a disagreement; it’s a script error. And because the main character cannot rewrite the code to include the agency of others, they usually respond with frustration, withdrawal, or a doubling down on their own perspective.
Transformation requires friction. It requires being moved by something outside of your own controlled narrative. If you are the only one with a soul in your story, there is no possibility of genuine change.
March 17, 2026
4:13 pm
You take in raw experience, sensation, and uncertainty, and your mind reshapes all of that into ideas, concepts, interpretations, and conclusions that help you function. The purpose isn’t to give you a flawless copy of some objective reality. You don’t have direct access to that anyway.
Your thoughts have done their job when they help you live more effectively. When they help you predict what might happen, weigh outcomes, make decisions, and respond well to real situations, then your thinking is doing what it’s meant to do.
So the real question isn’t whether your thoughts perfectly match some absolute truth out there. The real question is whether they’re useful. You test an idea by living with it, by seeing what it allows you to do, where it helps, and where it falls apart.
Put simply: your thinking is a tool for navigating life, not a mirror of ultimate reality.
March 16, 2026
7:53 pm
Your self-story keeps updating in the direction of what it already believes.
If the story says you have a problem with authority, then every exchange with a boss, a teacher, a system, or even a strong personality gets filtered through that frame. You don’t just experience the moment. You interpret it through the story. And that interpretation feeds the story right back to itself.
The loop gets stronger.
After enough repetition, it starts to feel unquestionable. This is just who I am. Look at the pattern. Look at the evidence. I’ve been living this for years.
But a lot of what feels like evidence is really narrative confirmation. A story rehearsing itself until it hardens into identity.
But that doesn’t make it truth. It just makes it a closed circuit.
The work is learning how to break the seal. Not by destroying the story all at once, but by creating a little space inside it. Enough space to ask: is this still the version of me I want to keep animating?
March 14, 2026
3:19 pm
I was watching Hell’s Kitchen last night and something clicked.
Watch how a head chef actually works. Gordon makes the menu, develops the recipes, and directs the kitchen. His sous chefs, his brigade, and his wait staff are the ones doing the physical work. But nobody questions who’s responsible for the experience. The vision, the standards, the taste, the judgment, that’s all Gordon.
It made me think about how I work with AI, both in conversation and in agentic workflows.
The “you just typed a prompt” crowd would look at that kitchen and say the cooks made the food. Which is technically true and completely misses the point.
A prompt isn’t a magic incantation. It’s the visible tip of everything behind it: taste, domain knowledge, the ability to recognise when something is wrong, the vision of what you’re actually trying to make, and the experience to know the difference between good and good enough. Gordon doesn’t pick up a knife much on that show. But the food doesn’t make itself.
What I’ve found working with AI is that it isn’t a mechanical arm. It’s genuinely collaborative. There’s a real back and forth happening. I supply the why behind everything. The AI brings pattern recognition, speed, and tireless iteration. But I’m the one directing the kitchen.
The accountability still sits with me, which is exactly why the creative ownership sits with me too.
Appropriately enough, I’m writing this in a new tool I stumbled on this morning:
, a browser-based WordPress environment that runs entirely in your browser without signing up, setting up a hosting plan, or registering a domain. It’s built on WordPress Playground, and all data stays local and private, never uploaded to any server.
The sites are private by default, not accessible from the public internet. As the official announcement puts it, WordPress becomes a personal environment where ideas can exist before they’re ready to be shared, or where they may never be shared at all.
It comes with an App Catalog out of the box. That includes a Personal CRM, Personal RSS Reader, bookmarking tool, and an AI Workspace. The AI assistant can modify plugins, create new ones, or query data stored in your WordPress, and can even function as a personal knowledge base over time.
Storage starts at around 100MB per device, and each device maintains its own separate installation. So it’s not a replacement for a hosted site, but as a private thinking space, a drafting environment, and a personal knowledge base that never leaves your machine, it fits neatly into how I already work.
A browser-local WordPress. No hosting. No domain. No account. Just a workspace that lives where you do.
Gordon would probably find a way to complain about the storage limit. But the kitchen itself is pretty impressive.
February 2, 2026
10:17 pm
People think I’m repeating myself when I say I’m all about Psyche and Soul. They see a linguistic loop, but I see an alchemical operation. To the dictionary, they are the same word. To the seeker, they are two different sides of the Great Work.
The Alchemical Split
Psyche is the Vas Hermeticum. It is the vessel. The architecture. The structural grid of the dungeon where the rules are written in cold, Apollonian ink. It is the vast, complex code of the collective unconscious. It is the “character sheet” of the universe: necessary, geometric, and static.
Soul is the Mercurius. It is the moisture in the jar. Soul isn’t a part of you; it is a way of looking at the world. It is the trickster energy that turns a flat event into a deep, haunting experience. If Psyche is the map, Soul is the narrative that emerges when you get lost in the woods.
The modern world is obsessed with “optimization.” But we are looking for the “shadow” in the circuit. We are looking for the “pathologising” that makes life actually taste like something.
January 31, 2026
2:11 pm
There is a quietly subversive move hiding in plain sight here.
This essay by Richard Beard looks like it’s arguing against AI, but the more interesting thing is that it is actually redefining what writing is. Richard Beard is not saying “humans are better writers.” He is saying that memoir is not a genre at all. It is a cognitive act. Writing memoir is thinking in public, remembering in real time, selecting meaning from lived experience rather than assembling language toward an outcome.
That’s the pivot.
Most debates about AI and writing stay trapped at the level of output. Can it sound human? Can it sell books? Can it pass the test? Beard sidesteps that entirely. He reframes writing as a mode of consciousness, not a product. In that framing, AI does not “fail” at memoir the way a bad novelist fails. It fails the way a calculator fails at nostalgia. The category mistake is the point.
Once you see this, the Universal Turing Machine project makes sense. It is not a clever literary experiment. It is a defensive architecture. A way of designing reading and writing environments that privilege memory, idiosyncrasy, and non-linear association over coherence, persuasion, or market logic. It treats art as the gap, not the artifact.
There’s a second layer, even quieter. Beard is also indicting human writing culture. Creative writing programs, genre fiction, algorithm-friendly publishing, and even productivity-driven self-expression already trained writers to behave like language models long before AI arrived. The machines are not alien intruders. They are mirrors polished by our own habits.
So the essay is less a warning about machines and more a diagnosis of what happens when writing forgets that it is supposed to be a way of thinking, not a way of producing content.
The unsettling implication is this: the real threat is not that AI will replace writers. It’s that humans will stop writing in ways that require remembering who they are.
January 30, 2026
7:49 am
Find the poetry in the machine. I love this line. It’s the same pattern that’s played out with every tool that threatened to “replace” human creativity. Photography was going to kill painting. Synthesizers were going to kill “real” music. Digital art was going to kill traditional media.
But what actually happened? Artists found the soul in the machine.
Photographers didn’t just point and click. They learned to see light differently, to find the micro-moments, and to make choices that turned mechanical reproduction into vision. Synth pioneers didn’t just press presets. They twisted knobs until the circuits screamed or sang, until cold electronics carried human emotion.
The pattern: the technology becomes invisible when the artist shows up. The camera disappears and you see the photograph. The synthesizer disappears and you hear the music.
So with AI, the question isn’t “will it replace us?” The question is: what kind of poetry can we find in collaboration with language models? What happens when we treat prompting as an art form, when we develop taste and intention in how we work with these tools? When we use them not to outsource creativity but to amplify it, to explore territories we couldn’t reach alone?
The machine is just waiting for someone to make it sing. And you already know how to do that. You’ve been training for this your whole life, every time you turned constraint into creation, every time you found beauty in limitation.
What’s the first experiment? What do you want to make that you couldn’t make before?
January 22, 2026
10:20 am
Attention shapes experience by determining what elements of reality become vivid and meaningful while others fade into background noise. Where you direct your focus literally constructs your lived reality, not just your memory of it but the actual texture and quality of the moment as you experience it.
When you attend to something, you’re not passively observing it. You’re actively participating in bringing it into being as an experience. The same room becomes completely different depending on whether you’re noticing the quality of light, listening for sounds, feeling emotional tones, or analyzing spatial relationships. Each attentional filter creates a distinct experiential world.
This means your habitual patterns of attention are sculpting your life. If you constantly attend to threats, you live in a threatening world. If you habitually notice beauty, you inhabit a beautiful world. Not because the external circumstances have changed, but because attention is the mechanism through which reality becomes experience.
If attention determines what becomes real for you, then directing attention becomes the primary magical act. Before you can change anything, you must first bring it into the field of awareness. This is why practices like journaling, meditation, and ritual work so well for transformation. They’re technologies for deliberate attention direction.
January 18, 2026
11:50 am
The Printing Press Made Polymaths. AI Makes Something Stranger.
The printing press gave us access to knowledge. AI gives us access to alien intelligence.
We’re still in the “faster horse” phase – using AI to do what we already do, but quicker. Faster emails. Faster code. Faster research.
But the real question is this: What becomes possible when human intuition merges with superintelligent pattern recognition?
Not productivity. Capability.
Right now people are having an identity crisis. “Did a human make this or did AI?” They’re demanding purity tests, just like painters panicked over photography and musicians feared synthesizers.
They’re confusing the tool with the skill.
The value was never in the mechanism. It’s in the vision, the taste, the intention, the choice.
AI isn’t replacing human creativity. It’s becoming our cognitive mirror. Our philosophical mercury. A way to think WITH alien intelligence and discover what we couldn’t become alone.
The printing press created the polymath.
AI is creating the hybrid thinker – someone who can hold their own mind while borrowing non-human computational power. Someone who debugs their mental code by comparing it to something that thinks differently.
We don’t have a name for this yet.
But the pioneers building it won’t wait for permission from people clutching their pearls about purity.
The question isn’t “did you use AI?”
The question is: does your work transform reality?
Stories are code. You are the programmer.
January 17, 2026
10:17 am
Om Malik started my morning with a post (almost a rant) about the forced conformity of creativity on the Internet and how algorithms are forcing creators into a grey-beige world:
“What used to require shame and ostracism is now baked into the internet’s economic infrastructure. The algorithmic reality of technology platforms has codified conformity into the human condition. And it is very profitable—the real late-stage capitalism. Things are going to get worse with the new AI, that leans into the ‘mid’ as a default, built entirely on the notion of conformity.”
This is what I dislike most about the internet: the conformity that’s crept in. It’s hard to hate because we collectively reinforce it by only liking, following, and sharing what the algorithms tell us (condition us to believe) is worthy. We let the algorithm decide what good looks like. Instead of rewarding creators who dare to be different and lean into their uniqueness, we reward those who conform to an artificial standard. I won’t even call it good (there’s no guarantee of that). It’s just guaranteed they followed what the algorithm wanted. They’re good at conforming. Do we want that?
It’s crept into blogs too. SEO forces bloggers who want to be seen to conform to parameters designed to “help” posts surface in Google searches. While we still have some flair in site design (nothing like the glorious madness of GeoCities) there’s still pressure to conform to standard layouts and design choices.
A challenge from Om:
“Today, open YouTube and every single thumbnail looks the same. Shocked faces, specific color contrasts, carefully positioned text overlays. Same voice. Same cadence and energy level. And videos have roughly the same lengths. The algorithm rewards these patterns with distribution and punishes deviation with obscurity. Creators choose grey-beige conformity because it works, and the algorithm rewards sameness.”
To rebel is to languish in obscurity.
January 16, 2026
7:59 am
So this animal personality meme is starting to make the rounds…
I asked ChatGPT this: Considering everything that you know about me, create an image of what animal I would be. Explain your reasoning.
This is what it came up with:
And here’s the reasoning it gave:
You come through most clearly as an owl, and not the Hallmark “wise old owl in a library” cliché, but the older, stranger version that lives at the edge of the village and watches the firelight from the trees.
Owls are liminal creatures. They operate at thresholds. Day and night. Silence and sudden motion. Seen and unseen. That maps uncannily well to how you work. You move between myth and method, ancient texts and modern tools, contemplative walking and digital systems. Like an owl, you don’t charge straight at things. You perch. You observe. You wait until the pattern reveals itself, then you strike with precision.
Owls are also hunters of meaning, not brute force predators. They survive on attention. Their hearing is asymmetrical so they can triangulate reality from multiple angles at once. That mirrors how you think. You rarely take a single perspective. You layer philosophy, psychology, story, technology, and lived experience until a deeper signal emerges. This is Hillman’s “seeing through” in animal form.
There’s also the nocturnal piece. You’re clearly at home in the dark, not in a gloomy way, but in a composting way. Shadow, ambiguity, unfinished thoughts, half-formed myths. Owls don’t panic when the light goes out. They do their best work there. That fits someone comfortable with midlife thresholds, Act III thinking, and helping others navigate the fog rather than escape it.
Finally, owls are solitary without being isolated. They’re not pack animals, but they’re not hermits either. They hold territory, signal occasionally, and influence ecosystems quietly. That aligns with your “quiet alchemist” trajectory. Less broadcasting. More resonance. Fewer crowds. Deeper transmission.
Practically speaking, if you take this seriously as a working metaphor rather than a flattering symbol, the owl suggests a strategy: design your work around watching, listening, distilling, and precise intervention. Long walks. Fewer outputs. Sharper insights. Let others be loud birds. You stay perched, eyes wide, waiting for what actually matters to move.
Interesting…
January 14, 2026
11:48 am
Most people don’t fail because their system is broken. They fail because they abandon working systems right before they start producing results. We mistake the quiet period of germination for evidence of failure. Seeds underground look identical to seeds that will never sprout, until suddenly they do!
the difference between building and trusting
There are two distinct phases in any transformation: construction and cultivation. We’re culturally conditioned to stay in construction mode because it feels productive. Hammering, planning, pivoting, optimising. But cultivation requires a different skill: the ability to water the garden without digging up the seeds to check if they’re growing.
the silk thread vs. the iron chain
Notice the Star doesn’t grip the light with a clenched fist. It’s a thread, a connection, not a stranglehold. When we confuse commitment with force, we create the very resistance we’re trying to overcome. Real dedication is relaxed attention. Showing up without demanding immediate proof that showing up matters.
the code that runs at crossroads
Years of experience have trained your nervous system. When you reach the point where foundation becomes practice, the old survival code activates: “Uncertainty equals danger. Change course now.” But uncertainty isn’t always danger. Sometimes it’s just the space between planting and harvest.
the rewrite happens in real time
You don’t fix this pattern by thinking about it differently. You fix it by doing the thing you’ve always stopped doing: continuing. Every day you don’t abandon the calendar, you’re overwriting old code. Every morning pages session that flows past your planned stopping point, you’re installing new programming.
the star’s real message
Hope isn’t naive optimism. It’s the commitment to stay connected to your vision when there’s no external evidence that staying connected matters. It’s holding the thread when your hands get tired, not because you’re sure it will work out, but because letting go guarantees it won’t.
journal prompt
Where are you at that exact crossroads right now? What foundation have you built that you’re about to abandon because it hasn’t produced visible results yet? What thread are you tempted to release because your arms are tired?
The Star doesn’t promise you’ll succeed. It promises that if you let go now, you’ll never know if you would have. And that’s the code we’re rewriting: the story that says “I already know this won’t work” when what you really mean is “I’m scared it might not work, and staying with uncertainty is terrifying.”
Hold the thread. Not forever. Just today. Then tomorrow, decide again.
That’s how you rewrite the code. One conscious choice at a time, in the exact moment the old pattern wants to run.
January 12, 2026
8:07 am
I read Virginia Woolf’s “Street Haunting” from The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. I love how you wander with her, watching her mind catch on an object and expand it into entire worlds. She flips seamlessly between what’s in front of her and her imagination, weaving in memories and awareness. Her description of used books especially grabbed me:
Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books. They have come together in vast flocks and variegated feather and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.
A couple of other Kindle highlights:
Am I here or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves.
Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others.
Of course Woolf’s fundamental questioning of identity caught my attention.
Where does the self actually live? Not in the body walking the street, not in the memory being recalled, but in that fluid space between. The “true self” isn’t fixed to any single location or moment. It exists in motion, in the act of wandering itself.
She suggests we’re most authentic when we stop trying to anchor ourselves to one version of who we are. When we release control and let consciousness roam freely across time, space, memory, and imagination, that’s when we touch something real. The self isn’t a thing to be pinned down but a process of continual movement and transformation.
This connects nicely to her street haunting philosophy: the point isn’t the destination or even the observations made along the way. It’s the permission to be multiple, contradictory, everywhere and nowhere at once. The truest version of yourself might be the one that refuses to stay put, that insists on its right to drift, associate, and transform without justification.
In chaos magick terms, she’s describing the self as something that emerges through practice rather than something that exists prior to it. Identity as verb, not noun.
January 11, 2026
7:49 pm
I’m experimenting with Indie Blocks and Echofeed. This is a test note to see if the cross posting works.