Monday.
Again.
Time escapes me;
it always does.
A holiday, they say.
I clean. I game.
I call it balance.
Eating From the Trough
‘The Feed‘ as a technical term, is used to describe a UX pattern within an app or platform. But for me, it conjures the image of cattle lined up in a barn, heads through bars, gorging themselves from a trough. Pigs, cows. … any domesticated animal being farmed.
Relatedly, there’s that classic phrase from the 2010s: the only people who call people users are tech companies and drug dealers.
I’ve been writing (with an LLM, obviously) about the conditions that birthed the SLOP MACHINE for the last couple of months. Now, I’m ready for some self-experimentation. I wish to stand before the machine and pull the handle over and over again. I will consume whatever comes out.
For the next week, at least, I’ve decided to eat as much slop from the trough as possible. I’ve installed the SUNO app on my phone, and I’m only going to listen to AI-generated music. Both the tracks I create, and the featured or recommended charts served up by the platform.
I want to put myself in the mindset of people who are really into this stuff. I’m sure there are some for whom this is their life, and I want to experience it too. Full immersion. I’m going to catch up on the backlog of Trisha Code episodes and watch all the uncanny videos people are posting from Veo 3—whatever I can find. To be honest, right now, it’s all I see on LinkedIn.
Let’s be clear: I’m not expecting a gourmet experience. This is a deliberate descent into the digital pigsty. I want to feel the cognitive dissonance, the mental bloat. I fear potential nausea from overconsumption. But I’m going to treat the coming week as an act of self-interrogation, guided by some of the critical questions I’ve explored in my own writing:
I don’t think people who are deep in this world are clueless about what they’re consuming. If anything, I suspect they navigate it with a layer of irony. Close friends reading this, who are Butlerian Jihadists will, I’m sure, be fully expecting me to encounter the stark difference between ‘content’ and ‘connection’. Between the machine and the so called human voice.
I wonder: will the unreality creep in by midweek? Will I be exhausted by it all?
Wish me luck, there’s only one way to find out.
IRL
Meanwhile IRL, it’s been another jam packed week with big events. And I wish to make a public note on the blog that one of Eve’s oldest friends Jenny, married the drummer in my band Mark this week:
Don’t they look lovely!?
Quarterly zine; my gift to you ✉️
Photo 365
The Ministry Of My Own Labour
- Closing down this first phase of the RED TEAM project
- Put a couple of thousand words into METIS III
- Started work on ‘Part 4’ of SLOP MACHINES.
- Started work on next phase of RED TEAM, and started spinning up mentally for LORE project.
Terminal Access
This Substack post on ‘The Curious, Unparalleled Ickiness of Video Games’ was shared in multiple dark forest clearings I frequent this week. Causing a riot of discussion! It looks at the friction often caused in relationships by video games through the trad pop psych gender divide lens.. its a bit of a bong rip.
Modern gaming is framed as a pure sink of male achievement drive: effort poured into competitive hierarchies that generate neither resources nor social capital useful to a partnership. It’s not just seen as a useless waste by women, but as an active demonstration of a willingness by men to try and excel at something with zero payoff for the relationship.
IMO the piece could go further by also looking at social media. Another useless time sink, but one that, as a ‘gossip technology’, feels more ‘socially useful’ to women and less like a betrayal of potential?
Here’s the entire section on Male Ambition presented without further comment.
4. Ambition Sinks
Per the Ambition Sink Theory, women are especially sensitive to the ambition, resources, and social status of their male partners, and they regard video games as powerfully retarding the maximization of those attributes (even more than other hobbies). By honing their competencies and ascending hierarchies in digital worlds (often specified by rankings or level systems, but these frequently translate into esteem from other gamers), men are exactly replicating the kind of ambition and social climbing their female counterparts cherish, but those men are unable or unwilling to effect similar traction in the outside world, within the status hierarchies that women view as legitimate and benefit from.
This juxtaposition of male industriousness in the virtual realm and their fecklessness offline is vexing, and the frustration of trying to convince their partners to swap those levels of effort could be what’s so infuriating. Maybe what burns up women so much is seeing the particular thing the covet routinely misallocated (in their view) and their inability to coax male partners into redirecting those same energies towards gathering momentum in the workforce and improving the couple’s social standing.
Because such a large fraction of what’s potentially appealing about men as companions (to women, at least) is their career potential, even women with super-elongated mating timelines often need to place uncertain bets and forecast their partner’s future earnings (to the extent men do any forecasting, it’s more about downside risk and less about upside). So, it’s understandable that women would monitor ambition like this theory supposes: maybe female hatred of gaming emanates from a fear that they’ll need to readjust projections about their partner downward, spoiling their impression of him and requiring her to discount her expectations more steeply. Are women managing their romantic portfolio like investors in this way? Do men give them little choice by being otherwise undesirable?
An impecunious pursuit absorbing their partner’s ambition isn’t always sufficient to disgust women, though. For example, they wouldn’t object to him postponing careerism to prepare for competing in the Olympics; they’d gladly stomach the financial hardships entailed by something like that, given there’s potential validation that translates to status hierarchies women value (e.g., from something like the Olympics). Thus, if hatred of video games is tied to wasting ambition, it’s not entirely focused on financial standing—it’s more about status.
Would love to hear your thoughts on this article, on your blogs or in the comments!
Dipping the Stacks
Sandseter identifies six kinds of risky play:
(1) Exploring heights, or getting the “bird’s
perspective,” as she calls it—“high enough to evoke the sensation of fear.”
(2) Handling dangerous tools—using sharp scissors or knives, or heavy hammers that
at first seem unmanageable but that kids learn to master.
(3) Being near dangerous
elements—playing near vast bodies of water, or near a fire, so kids are aware that
there is danger nearby.
(4) Rough-and-tumble play—wrestling, play-fighting—so kids
learn to negotiate aggression and cooperation.
(5) Speed—cycling or skiing at a pace
that feels too fast.
(6) Exploring on one’s own.
I’m an Apple fan in 2025. What does that even mean?
Corporations, court decisions to the contrary, are not people. No person will live as long as Apple will, because it now has so much money that there is no practical way for it to run out. Tim Cook could go on a wild shopping spree and buy Luxembourg, and it would just be a bad quarter for the company. (…)If Apple really does believe in changing the world, as it so often claims, the opportunity is there. As one of the most powerful companies in the world (if not the most powerful), the power to buck the system is in its hands. It could decide
“Periodic table of machine learning” could fuel AI discovery
MIT researchers have created a periodic table that shows how more than 20 classical machine-learning algorithms are connected. The new framework sheds light on how scientists could fuse strategies from different methods to improve existing AI models or come up with new ones.
The Value of Nothing: Capital versus Growth
Of course, Andreessen was correct to claim that software was eating the world, but he had the causation backwards. Software’s high valuations were not the result of its extraordinary technological promise. Rather, the software sector had become the primary locus of innovation because of its high valuations. Its financial characteristics allowed software to attract growth investment while other sectors no longer could.
social networks are like a blackhole for our content
These social networks are like a black hole, once we publish them we’re likely never to see them again unless we use specific tools. Some people think that is their purpose – we’re meant to be posting ephemeral content anyway. But I actually cherish these imprints of my selves.
Reading
Who has chance to read anything when one is so busy?
Music
Jewelia – Little Wins
I’ve been getting adverts for London based indie pop synthpop artist Jewelia and i finally checked out her 2024 album Little Wins, and I love it. To my ear it sounds like late 00’s early 2010’s alt pop, or rather post-crash pop. Which make sense when you think about it as I have filed Jewelia alongside other examples of the Post-Brexit pop scene that seems to be thriving in London right now. I’m going to try and get to some shows. See what pop like this sounds like in venues that I normally see hardcore punk bands in.
If synthpop is your think, this single Queen of Make Belive is a good entry point. And wow. what a DIY video. So cool!
Remember Kids:
Everything is creation and there are always patterns to perceive.
Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta
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