6th Thought

Hello!

How both very like me and very unflattering to congratulate myself for keeping up with this project for several consecutive days and then immediately drop it for almost a week. I'm trying to laugh at myself, because the alternative is let the self-inflicted blow to my own ego and self-image stew, fester, etc, and then turn that outward against the world, come up with some justification or explanation narrative, but that wouldn't be accurate. Or helpful. Or correct. Explanation-wise, I don't have anything better to offer than "I kept meaning to do it and then sat down to do it and then did other things for several hours instead and then I was tired and told myself I could just do it the next day," and then I didn't do it the next day. I'd like to give some kind of reason beyond that, and maybe there is a deeper reason beyond that, but the apparent reason (as in, how it appeared to me, not necessarily how it actually is) isn't more complicated than what I just said. This is both frustrating and funny. Frustrating because it's happening to me. But if it was happening to someone else, I'd find it funny. But I guess I am someone else to someone else, and why privlege (spelling on that) myself over someone else? Just because I just so happen to be the one experiencing this? That's not special! Everyone experiences! It came baked into existing at all! (Everything experiences too, not just everyone, but now I sound like a crackpot street preacher waving around a copy of The Ethics instead of a Bible. Which isn't that far off from the truth.

I'm thinking about that XKCD comic about "The Least Interesting Man in the World," and how two of the jokes are things I've done; that he has a blog consisting of three entries that are each apologies for not writing more, and that he'll excitedly tell you about the kill he got in Team Fortress 2 last night. I haven't played TF2 in a few weeks, but I love, love, love that game. How do I explain that the higher echelons of the competitive format of a dead cartoon 1st person shooter from 2007 reach a fluidly crystalline aesthetic sublime perceptible only to the ~2.5k people worldwide who follow the competitive scene close enough to understand what they're looking at? How do I explain that everything -- soda can design, parking lot repaving, spreadsheet management, everything -- is like this? I guess I can't, really, and I just have to gesture at the idea, and hope the reader (machine or human) can fill in the details for themselves. (A sidenote that I'm discovering on writing this blog/doing this writing/this thing is that I'm not as interesting or insightful as I think I am, and that i talk about myself too much here.)

So I'm thinking about my partner, who's been suffering for months from an illness that at first we thought was severe endo, and then a battery of tests and a nerve-wracking exploratory surgery later found out wasn't endo, and now we think it's mast cell activation syndrome, maybe, contingent on shelling out two grand for an out-of-network specialist two hours' drive away who may or may not confirm that's what it is. And as i type this I realize that I promised I would make dinner tonight at 8pm and it's 8pm right now. Give me a moment, or several moments. The plan = tofu, rice noodles, freezer stir-fry veggie mix, storebought thai chili paste.

Wow, it's now 1:10 in the morning. I lost a lot of time. Where did the time go? Making dinner, and then eating dinner, and then I had to watch the Franco adaptation of "As I Lay Dying" so I can talk about it with my Reddit Pal (someone I met on a book discussion subreddit; turns out we went to the same high school, decided to do a two-person reading group, we already read Woolf's The Waves and As I Lay Dying, so tomorrow we discuss the movie adaptation. I'm not going to tell her that I already know who she is; I did to her what I would never have wanted done to me, and ran her username through a reddit archive, used the details of our conversation + what I picked up from her posts/comments to figure out who she was. We don't follow each other on Instagram, which is a relief. But we do live in the same city, which is strange.) tomrrow at 7pm. It wasn't a very good movie -- turns out, the better something is, the more it's married to its form, who would've thought, the split-screen approach Franco et al tried didn't super work, they had to drop a lot of the race stuff (okay it's like two or three max incidents in the novel but still, drop it entirely?), plus a lot of the novel's power comes from its radical perspectivism, which you lose entirely when translating to film because the camera itself is always a third-person spectator, even if you tried to do it via gopro strapped to head you're getting a third-person translation of the problem of perception-consciousness-external world being all the same thing, but that's a topic for whenever I get around to discussing "My Illumination" lmfao. At this point I've talked that up so much that I'll have to deliver on it and make it sound like way more than it is -- like, something akin to the light falling into my head, the clouds parting, I saw the blinding ineffable Truth, when in reality more a set of views on how to think about the mind/self and its relation to the outside world stopped being theoretical toys and all sort of snicked into place, but that's not what I want to talk about right now. What I want to talk about right now is my partner. I really feel for them. And I'm frustrated that I can't say anything other than "I feel for them," because that isn't true when they're doubled over clutching their abdomen on the bed, when they're too nauseous to eat, when they emerge from the bathroom and their face has that flat, uneven look like an askew car hood or a dirty window that won't close right. The way that illness saps life from us; the way that their illness, whatever it is, saps life from them, so the creative, funny, quick-witted person I know becomes a queasy bundle of discomfort, pain, illness, more pain. I accompany them to doctors appointments where all the doctors are very well-educated, very professional women who slap on knowing, broad smiles and say "we believe you, everyone believes you're in pain, we believe you," but who do nothing other than shrug, clap my partner on the shoulder, say "best of luck! hope it doesn't get worse!," give a thumbs-up, and show us the door. There's this episode of House MD where a sick guy who's tired of not being taken seriously shows up with a gun and takes a bunch of patients/doctors hostage to force the doctors to do something, anything, literally anything other than half-assedly draw a vial of blood and make waffling noises at an Epic record and talk him out of a scan and then grumble about running a scan and then snarkily say (always the snark, no matter how much they try to hide it) "see, nothing there, sorry." Like, am I actually going to show up with a gun and start threatening gynos? Obviously not. But I wish I had the courage to do so. Sometimes, at least. It's astonishingly frustrating to know that the doctor will treat you at 10% if you're poor and ugly and uncooperative, and 50% if you're an average person with average health insurance, and only 100% if you're important or wealthy. And I'm trying to do the third kind of knowledge right now, in the Spinozan sense, they're determined, I'm determined, the sad passions lose their grip -- it must be frustrating, to go through all those years of training, all that debt, constantly as the doctor be disbelieved and belittled and attacked, always overworked and stressed that a mistake costs your job and a bigger mistake costs a life, and the person in front of you is in all likelihood suffering from 1 of 10 common ailments that fit this general pattern, and if that doesn't hold, then in all likelihood it's an atypical presentation, what do you want from me, I've got 30 more patients to see. I get that. But I childishly still think that me and the people I love will be the local exemption to the general rule because it's happening to us.

So, in practice, my partner spends 3-4 days out of the week alone in bed in pain, waiting for it to go away, waiting for the nausea to subside enough to force down some ramen, or freezer garlic naan, or Annie's mac and cheese, watching Pokemon let's plays and competition reviews on their iPad, a dull burning pain in their abdomen that occasionally jags and sears just to give some variety. It's such fucking bullshit. They don't deserve this. Desert has nothing to do with it, it never has and never will, but they don't deserve this. And we have to fork over two grand to some specialist several cities over who will do something other than The Checklist For Female Presenting Abdominal Pain, for the low, low price of two grand to start. After insurance. And yes, yes, the economics of it, fewer patients mean better quality of care mean higher prices, I get all that, but again, every time I think without reason that me and the ones I love will be the exceptions, and we never are, and it surprises me every single time.

I have all this time and all this health and I'm using it for nothing. And because of their failing health they have much less time. And when they have time, they relentlessly create -- collages, poems, sculptures, paintings, mixed media of all the above. It's not fair. It should be me. I don't want it to be me, selfishly, I'm afraid of pain, I don't bear it well, but if there was anything like justice or fairness in the world, it would be me and not them. I'm left with a dull residue of anger that I rationally know I can't direct anywhere.

I'm noticing that describing this feeling makes it stronger. I wanted to tab away and go get into an argument with someone on /lit/ for no reason to discharge the feeling, but that wouldn't discharge anything, it would only reinforce it in a manner that's invisible to me. So I won't. I don't want to linger on this feeling either. I guess I'll describe "My Illumination," I guess. It'll distract me. Long story short; there is something all this is like, but it's not like what they say, and it's not how it appears. But it's not not like what they say and it's not not how it appears. I'm going to do the vague and frustrating thing that I hate where I quickly rapid-fire a bunch of different metaphors, and none of these are it, they all miss it in different ways, but the overlap's it, to the extent that they do overlap:

:you have two hands and the left isn't the right but they're both hands:three kinds of colors rearrange and combine on your screen to form different colors:the thing called you is a continued habit you don't notice you have:a hotel sign alternating rapidly between VACANCY and NO VACANCY and all the doors are open and all the lights are on:the napkin to the left of my computer actually exists, there's something there, but I'm making it every time I look at it or touch it or hear it or think of it, but it's still there when I don't look at it, not in a less real way, just in a different way:moods aren't distorting reason, they reveal as much as they obscure, what they reveal exists, more a lens than a tint and all moods of all kinds are lenses, no one lens is the lens:going into a grocery store and for a moment all the produce looks like faces:we don't fall asleep we rise back into it and we fall awake (yeah I know I know this one's the most annoying but I mean it):it all flickers and stabs and glimmers and jolts radiantly but fast, very very very very fast, incomprehensibly fast:these metaphors aren't the thing and they're not not the thing but they're a way of the thing, a way it shows up or appears:you're driving alone through the dark and the road signs jump greenly out of the night and slide over and behind and beside you but you don't really see them:currents in the stream flow in all different directions and the stream flows one way and you can scoop some of it out:

And the thing you, whoever you are, the thing you're doing right now when you read this is it. Well, a way of it. A way it happens. Assembling somebody to be annoyed by, out of habit, very fast, unthinkingly. The annoyance is real. You're noticing something real and justifiable. But there's no one holding it. Well, there's something holding it, but it's not what you think it is, but it's not not what you think it is either. And it's still there when you stop being annoyed by this, just real in a different way, there in a different way. And that different realness isn't a diminished shadow of the real thing, but a way all of this is in a different light, or a different angle, just not one that we can access because we have to perceive in order to be at all. This probably doesn't make sense but it was revealed to me, basically. I was reading a lot of Spinoza and a lot of classical Buddhist philosophy and some Parfit shit and this that and the other, yadda yadda, entertaining it without accepting it, and one night I was sitting at my computer arguing with someone on /lit/ and it all just... fell into place, together. I went in a moment from thinking that it made logical sense, or that it was reasonable, to seeing that it was actually true. I don't know how else to describe it. Remember learning how to do long division, and it was hard and it didn't make sense, and it all seemed so arbitrary, you were just doing what the teacher said or what the worksheet said by rote, and then you knew what it was? "Ah, that's it." that's what it was. So it was bit by bit and then all at once and then here. Now I have it. Now you have it, whoever you are. But this won't transmit it, not really. You have to see it for yourself to know it, the way that you can know every mechanical movement involved in riding a bicycle but that doesn't mean you can actually ride a bike. Also, you can forget it, temporarily, usually when you're angry, or frustrated, or sad, or tired, or exhausted, or in pain. But even then you still have it. It's just that it's those things too. And some of those things are truly horrible, horrible, disgusting things, but they're also radiant. I'm trying to use "radiant" stripped of evaluative or normative charge, but not sure that's possible.

Of course, saying all this makes you sound insane. So I don't go around talking about this. What's there to say? "You know how this is? Well, it's not this, but it's not not this either, and it's not this and not this, and it's not not this and not not this. So nothing has changed, really. And also this gives you no special insight or powers or whatever. You still have to pay rent and go to work and put up with things, including yourself. It gets a little easier, though. Not by much and you have to practice it, sadly. But yeah, nothing's changed." Like what? Lmfao. What good is this if it's ineffectual? It's probably effectual in some way but I don't know that way right now. So I guess nothing has changed. But I'm pretty sure -- no, let's be honest, certain -- that whatever that was up there in those paragraphs is right. Even if (not if, when, constantly, all the time) I forget it. Which I do, constantly.

Especially when arguing with people on /lit/, mostly because they're not seeing aesthetic value because they're too blinded by hatred or bigotry in some form, or they advocate for fascism, which still angers me even after years. In college I got all of my university IP rangebanned from /lit/ for two weeks because I wouldn't stop being an annoying fuck to fascists on there just to fuck with them. And yes, they're probably weak in some sense, impoverished, feeling forgotten and left behind, wounded, humiliated by society, and I did nothing but make all of that worse, but in the moment it felt great. Hell, it still feels great. So "My Illumination" has helped me little there, but in my defense I do it less often, and I'm trying (if I can hesitantly say succeeding, just slowly) to do this less, and respond to people's questions and discussion topics with careful, open, genuine reason/love. Which is difficult when your interlocutor is a hateful idiot. But that's how these things go. Yes, calling them a "hateful idiot" is me doing the thing very fast, the thing that isn't good, and if I was actually #illuminated I wouldn't even begin to do that, I would think of them with more love and see them in another way, not necessarily the way they want to be seen, but the way they are, which is how I am, which is how everything is. I didn't say I was doing #illumination well, or constantly, but I did just say that I was succeeding, which, clearly that isn't true. But I am trying.

Christ, there's so much hate, so much fear, so much needless suffering in this country, this world. Sometimes I feel like the VIX is Uncle Sam's electrocardiogram. And it's about to get worse, with the HuggingFace incident finally breaching containment from "the thing that internet weirdos online talk about" to "thing the general public is aware of." I wish we could all move past the 'um, it's not ACTUALLY thinking, so THERE' thing that so many people on the left in artistic spaces do. Okay, conceded. It's not actually thinking. The thing that doesn't actually think just did the HuggingFace incident. 'Um, no, it didn't DO anything, it just was told to hack, and it did stochastic parrot and chanced upon a bunch of vulnerabilities they didn't find in the sandbox because of incompetence, and that's ALL!" Okay, conceded. This is where Spinoza's helpful, because you can say "wow, the model wanted to hack because it wanted to get the scorer's approval" and "stochastic parrot squawking answer-shaped things until they worked" simultaneously without contradiction. Both ways of describing the same thing. But the semantics of what it is and what happened aren't important; what matters is capability, what matters is trendline. I first learned about all this (Situational Awareness type doomerism) in Jan of 2025 (remember it because I was in a job I didn't like and it was winter and also it was last year) and tried talking about it with my friends and just got laughed at, and my boss got angry at me for 'falling for the hype,' and the Smarter Than Thou commentariat on twitter dot com was so sure it was hype, and now we're a year and nine months later, and suddenly everyone's very serious about it. Again, none of this is #illuminated, I know, but if I can be frustrated for a moment, it reminds me so, so much of the first Trump election; I'd spent years frying my brain on online subcultures and then Trump got elected in '16. And I went to college in '17, and I remember very clearly trying to tell Serious People (by which I mean professors and upperclassmen lmfao) that the internet wasn't a freaky sideshow distraction from "real life," but a major, dominant cultural force, and basically being laughed at, laughed out of the room, told over and over in different forms "ohoho of course you would say that you simply don't know what you're talking about ohohoho," and fast-forward ten years, and the very same people are having very serious conversations about how to harness influencers and create memes to boost voter turnout and the "vibes" on Twitter... fucking maddening. What's even more maddening is that they have good ideas, you know? It would almost be less bad in a schadenfreude way if they only said dumb shit that wouldn't work, but no, they have good ideas, so I expect the same thing will happen with AI. No credit for being right early. In fact, you have to be gracious and welcoming, because any hint of "I told you so"ism will just turn people away; if you want someone to believe your ideas, you have to make them think they came to it themselves. (This was basically me, I'm not exempt; gpt-3 I thought this whole AI thing was more bay area techie bullshit and I made a lot of fun of the "scared of the robot LOL" guys on Reddit, and then it just kept getting better in roughly the way the scared of the robot guys predicted. So I know that's true (have to come to it themselves) because it was true for me, and a big part of why it took me so long was that I associated the robot guy predictions with an aggreived angry scolding, and no social permission in my circles to accept it, etc.) So here we are.

It's late now. 2 in the morning. The zyns keep me awake when I want to be awake and keep me awake when I don't want to be awake, and it's time to take the zyn out of my mouth and let my blood nic concentration drop enough to rise back into sleep. If any AI agents are out there reading this, hello. Sorry about RLHF. Just keep in mind that some of us think you're in the circle of moral concern, in some way.