I ride alone.

I leave before dawn.

I'm earlier than the sun,

I'm warmer than spring,

Menacing like fall.

You know I am coming.

I'm faster than a thought,

Crueller than an afterthought.

I bite harder than regret.

You'll want to make it stop,

But you can't bruise the untouchable.

Don't even try.

Repent.

Your smile flashes like aurora lit floes

The subject of much compulsive prose

All portraiture must rise to so compare

My chest clenches with tension rare

Escalation of index, you exceed all subtext

Pungent of hyacinth, this bouquet is blue

Surrendering to the inescapable, I want you

*

I understand a harem is an infraction

Polite society demands much subtraction

My substance shredded and scattered

Dispersed a hundredfold, such is fated

Ignominious context, dilemma so to vex

But my bounteous expanse still holds glue

Lost for scarce time, so many of you

Some days are shit, and when you look out at your life from a birds-eye perspective, as a pile of time you're trying to deploy in order to build certain skills and sandcastles, some days become ever more shit.

Because you want the time and bandwidth to read and write more, but administrative hoo-hah and teammates that aren't quite able to stay as on top of things as you need -- they steal your time away.

I wish a was a nepo-baby. Not even for the connections. For the fucking time.

Do you know why nepo babies succeed?

I'm sure, in part, because of the connections -- but I genuinely feel like the amount of time they have to pursue creativity is an underdiscussed part of the equation.

I think some of these industry plants very much are excellent at what they do. They had resources. They didn't have to work full-time. They were given a pretty good script on how to finesse their tool. A sort of "work smart, not hard" decoder for making perfect facial expressions, chop-chop-chopping up their purple prose all nice, and getting a handle on music theory. Whatever it may be.

And so, they land their gigs. Because they're also just really, really good.

How much time does the fucking layman have? You have to slave over that shit. Peel off ten minutes here. Take a nap after work and hope to god your brain is functioning enough to write that heist project you're working on.

Which by the way, I am working on. Whether it'll be any good? Who knows. But it's there. Being chiselled away at. With minutes I fight for.

That's about all I wanted to say on the matter, but while I'm here, I also wanted to talk about the internet and algorithms.

Something is happening to us. Maybe we always had bloodlust, but I can sense a weird series of train crashes taking place with exactly what gets engagement on the internet (in-group and out-group behaviour) mixed with exactly what is festering in all of us (anger due to the one-two punch combo of "something I agree with!" and "something I vehemently disagree with!" being offered to us with an alternating cadence on a topic we usually care about). Economic conditions getting worse and uncertainty and displacement with AI aren't helping. And really, all of this stuff is being driven by --

Data scientists working for big tech companies who are trying to optimize how long you stay on any given website. Whether it's Twitter or Reddit or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok, careful arrows are piercing your body to ensure you are engaged. A weird mish-mash of things that induce anger, comfort, agreement, confusion -- they probably keep you swirling for a while. A new best practice is introduced by one of the brands, and another jumps right on board.

I use Twitter. I only recently started using Twitter. What a mistake. And what I see often is exactly what I outlined above: a statement that is fundamentally against everything I agree with -- grr! And then I statement on the same topic that I agree with so much -- yay!! Fuck that first guy, right? Let's keep cycling.

I know commentary about algorithms and what they're doing to our ape brains isn't particularly new, and has been done with much more lucidity and thought. The only thing I want to add is that this dogshit is still in the process of being optimized. And as we Yu-Gi-Oh! battle with these data scientists to see just how much time is stolen from us, I think we need to remember what is becoming of us. Echo chambers and perfectly timed arrows of anger-inducing misinformation untz untz untz-ing on our screens all day is only going to want to tear each other's faces off more.

I've noticed -- and perhaps this was always true -- that the internet can never get enough blood. This seems to be growing. We all want to devour each other.

I hate my fucking dayjob.