Link Log 29
2026-08-23
I skipped last week because I didn't have enough links. I haven't been actively curating and digesting my feeds like a good boy, so sorry about that.
Article from Orthodox Ethos showcasing the thirty-sixth letter of St. Joseph the Hesychast. An absolute master class on noetic prayer, St. Joseph gives a wonderful explanation for the Jesus Prayer and shows how a simple, circular prayer cannot lead to any kind of spiritual delusion. I've suffered from a lot of delusion, spiritual or otherwise, and these words help me remain bold in my prayer life, even when I feel too tired to come to God.
Baffler symposium on the profession that doesn't exist. I'm glad to know that I picked probably the worst job at the worst time in history to do it, and even more glad to know that it was never a job to begin with. That makes me feel so much better about my capacity to make decisions, and perhaps I should make more of them. Who knows what'll happen after that?
Been bumping Nightride FM recently. I was being kind of a ditz and was using mpv to stream the Lofi Boy YouTube stream, but that was such a waste of internet. This has given me my synthwave fix, but with less bloat and better sound quality to boot. How lovely is that?
Article from WIP on daycare pseudoscience. It's true that a lot of right-wing people have been villainizing daycare for quite some time, usually opting for home schooling or some other kind of community-based alternative. Both seem to speak to the same thing: whether it be in the hands of cold bureaucrats, some weird neighbor, or an auntie, it always takes a village to raise a child. Parents can't be asked to handle working life and childcare at the same time all by themselves; leaning on family, neighbors, or the government is all a part of a child's growth process. Growing up is stressful, silver spoon or no spoon. At the center of it all are the values those children learn from their environment, and hopefully it's one where they can find the good in people, regardless of ideological leaning or predisposition.
Article from Noema urging AI companies to take public feedback at scale. There are a lot of things I have wrong with this. First of all, the prose from all of these Noema "writers" is so laden with AI psychosis it makes me sick. Even if they came up with their lines and arguments themselves, it's grossly apparent that they have spent way too much time in the hypostatic prose chamber that is the LLM chat interface. Gross. Second, there's a certain implication of "progress" in the primary argument—that the changes in communication technology have led to overall change for the better in the name of a bleak sense of "democracy" and "freedom of choice." Have you seen the median person? Seriously? I don't think someone who wears their pajamas to shop at Walmart needs to give any input on political or social matters, quite frankly. That's a bit of a crass statement, but I'm sick of this intellectual dialogue on AI being this revolutionary thing. It's neat, but it's snake oil at this scale. We all know it, but keep going along with the lie for the sake of what? To keep from social collapse? I don't fucking care, man.
I discovered the Hermitix Podcast earlier this year, but was thrown off by a lot of the guests and subject matter because what it deals with is quite heavy for me. Occult things are a tough pill to swallow, but thankfully this episode with Paul Kingsnorth was nice for me. Kingsnorth helped establish the well-known Dark Mountain Project, and I didn't know he also converted to Orthodox Christianity some time ago. I think the beautiful thing these fringe philosophical movements have provided is a teleology that helps us remember the strangeness of life, and that there is so much more beyond our material conceptions. In the podcast, Kingsnorth pointed out that 96% of the universe is "dark energy," which is at best a tenuous concept. To focus so much on the material world is a dastardly thing, and hopefully these projects of mine help remind people to look beyond base hedonistic tendencies.
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