markjgsmith

2024/06/25 #

• It was a bit of a cold night, and it's still a litte bit chilly this morning, but at least it didn't rain. I got gifted a pork bun at some point, so that food gave me a some extra body heat to make it through. It followed a day of escallations that once again appear to have been triggered by an unprovoked incident at a food vendor stand. This time they simply called me a dog as I bought the food. I took it on the chin and in a hey-now friendly way made it clear to the vendor that wasn't okay, but I didn't blame her, the world is crazy sometimes, I understand. By the end of our interaction we both thanked each other, it appeared we had settled our differences. Btw, she had insulted me a previous time I went there for no apparent reason unnexpectedly fu-ing me right at the point of giving me the food when you both say thank you. And so it goes.

  But then immediately afterwards, a group of men at corner having coffee made a comment as I walked past, 'Good one' then lots of laughter. The situation was finished but they decided fir whatever reason to digg up old graves, and thus began an entire day of escallations. No chance of stoping it, from that point onwards everything you do is some sort of war, even if you ignore it and just go about your day, everything you do is interpreted as an attack, but anything they do is some sort of funny joke.

  There literally is no way to even communicate anything.

  So considering all that, the day went alright. I wrote two blog posts, a bunch of notes and links. Quite a lot of editing, the words were not flowing particularly well, perhaps because of all the turbulance. Listenned to a few podcasts, the mist interesting was probably the Keen On interview episode about liberalism. It's a concept that somehow is deceptively difficult to understand even though I feel it shouldn't be.

  Another day... #

• It's hard to describe this, but I'll try anyway. I appear once again to be stuck in between the forces of good and evil. The place where I'm sitting a man and a woman have sat next to me. They could have sat at nearby chairs and table, much more confortable, but decided for whatever reason to sit next to me intead. The man has a pork bun box. I was gifted a pork bun during the night.

  They appear to be waiting to see what I do. A similar thing happened yesterday evening before I went to sleep. Given the whole days events, I stayed awake until they left, which took quite a while.

  I know from experience that nothing I do at this point can be right. No matter what I do, it will be percieved in a bad way by one of these seemingly random people. If I stay, I will be yah!'d, if I go I will be told I'm going too quickly. That pattern started yesterday evening at the shop.

  It's a sort of RL race condition. Very difficult to deal with, because it ends up messing with your timing. Everything just seems out of step afterwards. And then you get blamed for that too.

  I'm just writting about it because I don't know what else to do. Incidentally they all just got up, they had turned into 3 people as another bloke had joined them, and left. One of the blokes, turned to me and said 'woah, thank you' as they walked off. I never said a word to them, I've never seen them before. #

• Ed Zitron on digital media: "What is possible is giving great people enough of a chance to build a real audience and a great product. A better world is possible for digital media, it just has to be built by and for the writers themselves." #

• Ben Collins on information scarecity [50:47]:

  There is a massive pollution of the internet happening to obfuscate good information [...].

  The more narrow it is to get good information on the internet, the only people that benefit from that are rich people. If the only people that have access to good information are rich people, the only people that benefit from that are rich people, and those rich people get richer from the good information.

  Once there is information scarcity, the people who will hoard it are the rich. They have no problem paying for a Bloomberg terminal, they don’t care. They’ll pay for the information [...].

  They will do that when everyone else is searching around for scraps on Google and Reddit.

• A followup from the earlier writeup. Rough notes very lightly edited because it's really tough writting about this stuff.

  First there was the man this morning thanking me for no reason. A short while later, another food vendor fake customer incident, imo linked to the 'yah woah' surge from last 24 hours. As I arrived at the food stand he shouted out 'liar' in my direction. I calmy replied after a few moments something to the effect of 'it’s the world that is the liar, it speeds people up just to slow them down again' and smiled. Intended as a light hearted comment about the human experience.

  The fake customer then tried to pretend offer to pay for my food. He very clearly said 'I pay' and pointed at my food, which incidentally I never ordered, the vendor had pre-pared it without asking me. I always get the same thing so she knew what I wanted. Still though she never asked me. Now I've had this trick played on me several times the past few weeks. I've written about it many times. I asked him why he was lying, why he was trying to create a problem for me, why he was pretending to pay for my food. He suddenly had nothing to say. I said 'you’re the biggest liar in the world'. The food vendor also had a very sheepish look on her face. I calmly told her she was lying too, calmly paid and calmly walked away.

  A bit further down the street I said out load 'stop trying to trick people everybody', to which there was an immediate reply from an anonymous female voice in the crowd 'Thank you'. Gee what are the chances. I guess now I'm the bad guy for something else.

  That was followed by another fake customer situation at the next food vendor. The male food vendor this time, took issue with me, repeatedly loudly saying Lie! Lie! Lie! Lie! as he prepared my food. I calmly said, he was the one lying after he gave me the wrong sauce. The sauce was warm btw, that’s unusual and is likely another warpath.

  There's been several subsequent incidents at the shop / cafe I am sitting at writting this note. All from apparent customers, who incesently are calling each other liars, or telling each other they are lying, but really it's obvious it's aimed at me, and of course it's all hilarious as far as they are concerned.

  I've kept my cool through it all. And each time I said nope 'I'm not lying, you are', they have been getting extremely adgitated.

  Also a young person, who seemed nice enough, asking me lots of personal questions, which is quite unusual. I tried to answer his questions as best I could, but very conscious that whatever I say will be turned against me by some. Having public conversations with personal information like this doesn't usually end particularly well in my experience.

  And guess what, after being polite and answering his questions, he walked off back to his friends saying 'he’s such a good liar'. I guess my hesitation and awkwardness didn't meet his Gestapo-like high standards. I had to once again say into the void that they were the liars not me. And remind them that if I answer the questions they fuck me, and if I don't answer the questions they fuck me. Either way I end up getting mutilated.

  Just another tsunami of escallations. Doesn't matter what you do, eventually you get mutilated. #

• Attempted to listen to a few really interesting podcasts today, but unfortunately the world had started infiniti No!-ing everything so it's been next to impossible to actually fully meaningfully absorb the content properly. Even as I type this I'm being infiniti No!'d. These were the podcasts:

  • The Dysfunctional State with Michael Malice (What Bitcoin Did Podcast)
  • Why we should fight for freedom of speech | Greg Lukianoff (Bankless Podcast)

  As you might have noticed reading the show titles that we might have reached yet another irony maximum. I'm half expecting a delinquant gang of paperclips to run past into the sunset laughing maniacly, chased by the rubix cube solver robot, chased by a rubix cube solver paperclip, chased by a comedy death fractal laughing and crying at the same time.

  What a shame, maybe I'll get a chance to listen to them again when the world isn't infiniti No-ing. :( #

Today’s links:

• Modern liberalism in the United States - I'm curious about this somewhat nebulous concept after listening to a recent Keen On episode #2105. Lots I didn't realise I didn't know about. Much bigger topic than I previously thought. en.wikipedia.org #

• John Rawls - American philosopher and probably the OG liberalist. en.wikipedia.org #

• John Rawls’ ‘A Theory of Justice’ - Most famous Rawls writing. This is a bit of a summary. 1000wordphilosophy.com #

• Nvidia remains a little-known brand despite briefly passing Apple, Microsoft in market cap - Interesting to see how Nvidia brand compares to the other top companies. Not so well known but brand recognition is climbing, especially in sectors such as gaming. www.cnbc.com #