Farm store out in the country but near a city. Local meat & produce and specialty imports. High quality, clean ingredients. Traditional, wood look. A roaming, fluffy dog and cat that welcome everyone in. Good sandwiches and quality coffee. Outdoor seating with nice views. A cornerstone of the community for locals and an oasis for passers-by. My house way in the back on a bunch of pasture. Christmas trees and pumpkins and other seasonal stuff. Maybe a dance hall, playground, and animal sanctuary.

Mainstream society is sick. Global fertility has halved since the 1960s from 5 to 2.3 and will soon drop below replacement. Countries like South Korea average 0.7 children per woman.

If there's true love between a man and a woman, then what's better than a healthy, loving family? Family is better than any wealth.

1-2 children is barely not gay. 3 children is the minimum. 5 children is okay. 10 children is the goal.

It's okay to be multi-dimensional; maybe even ideal. Fancy fashion at a steakhouse one night and a punk dive bar the next. Blunt one week and soft in another. A diet that's careful and indulgent. Country music in the morning and classical in the evening. A hike followed by the opera. Deep self-reflection while drunk. Reading Greek philosophy books at the gym. Careful recklessness. Agnostic pyschoanalysis. Confidently vague philosophy. Didactic humility. Thoughtful aggression.

These aren't contradictions. They're dabbling in different attempts at finding truth. This isn't "finding a balance" by doing everything at once but rather consciously imbalancing oneself. The personality fashions that we wear constrain our thinking so trying new ones on may expand it. They also act as signaling, tribal, and status mechanisms, both socially and sexually, which makes them tricky to flip between.

I've always struggled not judging people with facial tattoos. I used to think they were idiotic. But the best way I can sympathize with such people is that they were trying on a new personality fashion. Maybe channeling prison and gang culture was a way to confront existential unfairness, cosmic absurdity, or blunt trauma. The question isn't so much why they tried it on, but whether they're willing to try on something new or if they get stuck in a rut from which they can't grow out of, doubling down on inertia and comfort.

Anyone talking about growth mindset with only one fashion style in their closet isn't doing it right. But trying on lots of fashions is the easy part; the hard part is figuring out what each style metaphorically represents in relation to truth.

Cell2Jack: connect any corded phone to a cell phone over Bluetooth. Make and receive calls when in range.

SCENE: Car wash. A soapy car just exited the wash tunnel and stands dripping. Four workers are drying it with rags. Twenty feet away, two customers are looking at the car and talking to each other as another worker walks by.

CUSTOMER1: "I've never seen a drone at a car wash before!"

CUSTOMER2: "Yeah, that's neat."

WORKER: "Oh, that's just Donnie. He's working from home today."

There's something about travel where everything's new, every day's an adventure, and everything's exciting. Why can't that be true in our home cities, every day? There are plenty of things in each of our cities we've never seen, never tried, and never experienced. Even just walking through a grocery store and trying a new food is amazing.

One idea is that our homes are too comfortable. It's so easy to just melt into our couches, our phones, our laptops, our TVs, our beds, and our routines. Weeks float by in a blur. It's inconceivable to travel somewhere and do nothing new for a week, but we do it all the time at home. We might do stuff on the weekend. But 3 out of 7 days is lame. Sure, we're tired and busy but all it takes is 10 minutes to walk to a local store or park or say to a neighbor.

We should be achin' to get outta the house. When tired or bored or stressed, just go for a walk and look around. And then go home and sleep comfy.

Meta-cringe is when someone is cringing to something they shouldn't cringe to. For example, it's meta-cringe to cringe at well-done, wholesome country music, despite the dominant, cool culture cringing at it.

Meta-uncool is when someone is not cringing to something that they should cringe to. For example, it's meta-uncool to not cringe at poorly-done rap, despite the dominant, cool culture liking it.

But it's not always easy to tell. Question your involuntary reactions which have been molded by dominant, cool culture.

I think that something has to be both good and well-done. Cringey country music is good but not well done. Cool rap's aggression is well-done but its lyrics are bad.

Also, just because something is counter-cultural doesn't necessarily mean it's cool or non-cringe. A lot of counter-culture is trash, too.

What do good and well-done mean? Don't be afraid to find those answers yourself instead of just taking what the dominant, cool culture throws at you, or even most counter-cultures. More often than not, they're meta-cringey and meta-uncool.

And it's not meta-meta-cringe to analyze meta-cool because then philosophy would be meta-cringe, which it's not. At least, not cringey philosophy.

Voltaire's Candide is one of the most important books ever written. The ending is usually seen as a stoic or caustic response to irrational optimism.

What if it can be more than that? Besides the personal benefits, what if cultivating our metaphorical garden is the best way that cultural progress occurs? If so, then choosing what we mentally plant and how it's grown may have more profound importance.

I love that feeling in the shower when I'm freezing cold and hot water hits me. The joy flies through into an orgasmic eye twitch and deep sigh. I thought I'd see what OpenAI's DALL·E would create for the prompt:

cold person involuntarily feeling good when hot water hits them

This was the least weird one, and I didn't crop it or add that text!

FedEx just delivered a package that shipped nearly 1 and ½ years ago I always assumed that if delivery services find a package that they accidentally dropped behind some closet or something and it's more than a few months old, that then some worker would just take it home because of the embarrassment of delivering something after a few months, let alone years!

But no, FedEx were asked to get a package to me and nothing would stop them from delivering on their promise! Not rain, nor sleet, nor hail, and certainly not egregious incompetence! It's strangely endearing. Maybe this is some sort of 4D marketing chess?

Building brand loyalty through unconventional means

I forgot how fun Geocities was:

• Not knowing how to make a website look okay but then just looking at how other people do it and finding inspiration. Right Click } View Page Source or Inspect.
• The Neocities activity feed is endlessly interesting, not just because of the variety, but also in seeing people explore, struggle, and create. The half-baked sites show that it's okay to suck and fail.
• Collecting images:

  88x31 buttons
  

  99x56 stamps
  

  150x20 blinkies
  

  80x15 badges
  

  GIFs
  

  Minis
  

  And more
  

It's amazing that Neocities is free and you can edit your website in a browser editor (or through a folder on your computer).

It's fascinating how much of a mental straightjacket all the other cookie-cutter sites, apps, and social media put us in. Our creativity and our thoughts are transformed and squozen by the container we put ourselves in, like water.

This doesn't apply to just our internet personality, but we're straight-jacketed by political banter, social media posts, internet videos, memes, advertisements, propaganda, and just about anything entering our ears and eyes. How often do you select the topic of conversation? Even when you do, how often are you just parroting and sneezing on a mind virus from someone else, without even realizing?

Ostensibly, pictures and words have an ephemeral character. They don't physically touch us. In that is their power. Often, they penetrate deeper than a knife, into our subconscious, without us much realizing. Like a magic spell.

Our own, personally-curated and controlled website allows us to take back some of the power of pictures and words.

I ended up at Neocities because I was playing with Spacehey and I hit a straightjacket moment. Spacehey is quirky and nostalgic and it's great that you can edit and share CSS templates like Myspace; but, ultimately, it heavily restricts you. I don't even remember how I ended up finding Neocities but I'm so glad I did.