A Kinky App Fantasy

I’m getting myself into the groove; into the swing of things—why do phrases like this always try to sound so nonchalant?

There’s always a good feeling when things start to take shape. You add a section. Remove a section. Bring back a zombie brand from the dead. It’s a good feeling.

You even figure out that you’ve been running around in circles for no reason. That feels less good. I mean, it IS good but kinda feels like shit.

When we look at progress, we always use nice, neat lines trending upwards. But the experience of progress is actually nothing like that. It’s more like trying to get a drunk friend out of a bar before he pisses himself or starts a fight, while people slap you in the face with damp cocktail napkins. Your friend has vomit in the corner of his mouth but he’s convinced every woman he sees wants to kiss him. Good luck.

Was this forwarded to you? RUN! — or make life easier for both of us by subscribing to these weekend detoxes of my sad little brain.

DRUNK ON TECH

One main lesson I’ve learned from discovering I have an autistic brain: I’m not as one-of-a-kind as I think I am.

This sounds like a borderline masochistic thing to say, but as self-flagellating as it sounds, this discovery was actually a good thing. Discovering that things I do and ways I think were not solely “me things” made me feel more human. “You mean more pinch their thumb to each finger and count 1-2-3-4, 4-3-2-1 to comfort themselves?” (Yeah, that’s a real thing I do.) Discovering your weird is a shared weird is liberating.

So please allow me to liberate myself right here. I promise to keep my clothes on and not to soil the carpet.

I have a tendency to imagine the way things will work before I know what the hell I’m doing. I build perfect systems in my head only to discover later I can’t put the TV & entertainment center into the closet because you’d have to take the whole thing apart and put it back together INSIDE OF A CLOSET. Also, the closet is an inch too short. (Real life example.)

In my mind, here’s how things were going to work:

1. Collect and capture in Tana

2. Move to Heptabase to break things apart, move them around, and understand them.

3. Move things back to Tana in a new, highly efficient, linear form.

Here’s how things actually work:

In practice, the advantages of a non-linear workspace are nearly impossible to translate back into a linear format.

Sure, you can use a great whiteboard map of a book to write something linear like an article or newsletter, but you aren’t converting it, you’re interpreting it.

The movie always loses something from the book BECAUSE IT’S A MOVIE, not because somebody was lazy. You can’t make a two-hour film from a 600-page novel and expect things not to be omitted. You can’t even make three Dune movies without amputating key parts of Frank Herbert’s body.

In the same way, an infinite canvas is always going to convey things that an outline can’t.

So here’s my solution: Stick with steps 1 & 2. Stop there. The end. Mind-blowing shit, right?

DRUNK ON IDEAS

“Pagan Roots Of The Catholic Church” by Kenny Russell: Call me crazy but I’m fascinated by the way religions absorbed paganism. Which is why I’m endlessly amused to read that the Catholic Church didn’t just spring fully formed from the Bible - in fact, it’s got more pagan roots than a Druid painting at a Ren Faire. From Mary as the new Isis to the saints replacing the pantheon of gods, it’s a spiritual smoothie. Read this if you want to learn how early Christianity got a makeover courtesy of Emperor Constantine and how he slapped some Jesus stickers on existing pagan practices.

"The Science of Having a Great Conversation" by David Robson: Ever feel like you're talking to a wall? As an autistic, I know this feeling all to well. It turns out, there's science to explain why we suck at chitchat. Robson's got some nifty home remedies for your conversationally-transmitted disease, from asking follow-up questions to avoiding the dreaded "phone snub." Read this if you want to be adored—I mean, if YOU WANT TALK GOODER.

"George Washington’s views on political parties in America" by Dennis Jamison: Imagine George Washington rising from his dusty grave and seeing our current political clusterfuck. He facepalms so hard that he knocks his wooden teeth out of his skull. Good old George, President number uno, warned us about the dangers of political parties. Huge chunks of his farewell speech—but did we listen? Uh, no… We embraced them like a horny min-pin on your shin-shin. Read this if you want to understand why Washington laid out the yellow caution tape and ran like hell to Mount Vernon to start farming.

ROUNDS

I completely forgot to include books in last week’s newsletter. So lest you think I’ve become a lean mean killing machine, this is for two weeks.

Read Write Own by Chris Dixon: I listened to the whole thing in an afternoon. I’m really interested in how the blockchain can cut the corporate bandits out of the internet and bring back the real aspirations of the madmen who built it.

You Are What You Read by Robert DiYanni: Believe it or not, I finally got through this one. I even engaged with the subject matter enough to stop momentarily from wanting to shove sharpened pencils into my ears from the droning phoniness of the audiobook narrator. It’s actually quite a good book.

God’s Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madres by Richard Grant: I’m burning through this one. It’s a wild ride. Can’t wait to share my thoughts in the next issue of Read or Die a Slave (which, yes, is coming back as a monthly newsletter).

SHOTS

Me + Scrintal + Heptabase = Awkward PKM Threesome: Watch this if you want to vicariously experience the mental gymnastics of comparing two eerily similar yet frustratingly different note-taking apps without actually having to use your brain. You're welcome, and I'm sorry.

CHASERS

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ONE FOR THE ROAD

As these tools develop, what will be the thin line separating a PKM tool that uses ChatGPT, and ChatGPT, itself, functioning like a PKM tool?