Before breaking my fast this morning, with scrambled eggs n sardines, I published a piece on Medium: High Tech Villages, no paywall.
The piece packs together a lot of the memes threading through these blogs: EPCOT West, Trucker Exchange, Work-Study, Global U, XRL, GST, Project Earthala (use the search boxes if curious).
Another needle for the haystack.
I might get to go to OMSI today.
My dad didn’t wanna get stuck in the mud with boring habits that’d end up stultifying his mental growth. “Don’t get stuck in a rut” was one of his mottos, safe to say. He built habits to counter habit formation, which is recursive or paradoxical or one of those, but seemed to work pretty well. He benefitted from internalizing his own counter-culture.
I’m doing something similar around domestic habits, cooking in particular, given my long term interest in “home ec” as a topic. I’m letting an experienced Mexican lady on YouTube re-educate me regarding how to cook such basics as eggs and rice.
I realize a lot of us barely cook at all and I’ve gone through chapters in my life where I did not, much. For example in the Philippines we had a skillful live-in cook, Victoria, assisted by Flora. They knew their way around a kitchen. Mom could focus on her activism. Dad could focus on planning and teaching. I could occasionally go into the kitchen and proclaim (not too bratily I hope) that I wanted to ad lib a cookie recipe, and they’d help me, and do most of the cleanup.
At the university, later, all meals were provided, until…
…Until I joined a “food coop” in my junior year at Princeton (and stuck with it through my senior year as well). What’s that?
I don’t think my terminology paints the picture: we all cooked for each other as a group, taking turns, and we also procured our own food using a university allotted budget, I think is how it worked. The money most tuition-payers used on a meal plan, we used on ourselves. So I’d often be on a team of three, say, cooking for twenty or however many sat around the big dining table that day, at 2 Dickinson Street.
So I had some background in cooking for more than (a) myself or (b) a nuclear family (the model for a lotta Home Ec classes back in the day), when, fast forward, I started working with Food Not Bombs.
At FNB, already running smoothly when my household joined, I didn’t rush to the forefront of the cooking squads, meaning I was happy to cut vegetables and do other food prep, leaving the menu to the foodies higher up. Indeed, my main work was not in the kitchen at all, but was about riding a bicycle and pulling trailers, sometimes two, piled with fresh organic produce. Or later I might haul the readied food to the serving site: Colonel Summers Park in SE Portland.
FNB, if you’re not familiar, is designed around a manual (picture a 3-ring binder) of best practices, but how it’s implemented locally depends on who shows up to run the show. Our Portland chapter was centered around young people riding bicycles. I was one of the older participants, if not the oldest. My house was also a logistical hub for parking trailers and storing foods. My housemates were likewise organizers. I even got my Quaker meeting involved, as a cooking site, an alternative to St. David of Wales, which had a bigger (but more likely booked) kitchen.
So that’s a lot about “fooding” (a Himalayan term, as in “fooding and lodging”), however my main point, back to my dad, is staying limber in the habits department. Small seemingly inconsequential changes entails a willingness to stay flexible, meaning adaptable, oft required at a larger level.
Maybe you’re the CEO of a large firm. Yet you’re willing to relearn cooking from a Mexican lady. Maybe that means you’ll also be willing to keep relearning your main job. Dad was a planner. Planning is not a settled science.
In the Active Inference realm, we talk a lot about “free energy”, a variable, and too much of it signals the breakdown of something stable, and its search for a new home (sustainable framework). You could call that a crisis. But running a trickle of free energy all the time, sustaining your own internal counter-culture, by always waging a small scale revolution against small stakes (but ingrained) habits, is going to help your firm survive through the coming thick and thin. That’s the PR anyway. YMMV.
This morning I’m gonna do fried eggs a different way, which includes bringing them up to room temperature, using lard and a little water (next to, not on, the egg), and covering them while they cook. Closer to steaming than frying. I’ve already changed the way I cook rice.
Experimenting with new ways doesn’t always mean losing one’s ability to go with the old ways. Sometimes it does. Sometimes there’s an “I’ll never look back” aspect, where you might theoretically go back, but why? Other times it’s a matter of adding to one’s repertoire. You’ve never played jazz guitar before, only classical. Now you can play both, or, in my case, I stick with neither (life is short).
I went into this showing, at the CineMark Multiplex, a matinee (11 am actually), with a fresh mind, meaning I'd avoided doing a lotta homework pre movie.
However, since yesterday, when I saw it -- Dr D joined me, and drove me home (via WinCo); I came by Tri-Met -- I've been more immersed in the after-buzz. That helps me keep it brief; I think others are doing a good job.
As I was telling DAF in our meeting: I'm not super-focused on individual psychology as a topic, preferring the anthropologist hat wherein group dynamics are the thing, entire societies, subcultures, at least villages, which could be companies, which could be family-run. Here "the village" is Silicon Valley (far from "global"). These were characters of that milieu.
Meaning I don't wanna hafta try to get into Mrs. Thernos's head. I thought Nathan did a fine job with his own examination (of himself too).
Nor do I think Nathan at all oblivious to the wavelength I'm on: that of analyzing (or do we say deconstructing?) the subculture of VCs and circus barkers, startups, smoke and mirrors, California gold. What's hollow is at that level, no need to make it all be about the Holmes character, smartly groomed for her role.
When I say "groomed" I don't mean anything gross. Think of race horses, which are elegant. She plays herself. It's the world that swirls around her that provides a wave for her to surf. Techie capitalism ala Silicon Valley is a made-for-TV celeb world. I tend to distance myself from that matrix, as a Silicon Forester (Cascadia-based).
I go with the analysis that what we're really looking at are cult religions, staffed by dreaming zealots more than by any purely cynical money-making schemers (these categories overlap). They drank their own kool-aid. The cons need the true-believer pawns.
Put another way: deluding others is one thing; being outright delusional is another.
Maybe it's because I'm catching up on Deleuze-Guattari that I'm thinking capitalism must be schizophrenic.
These two Friends (Amigos) had been a part of a larger team of about a dozen Quaker not-missionaries, eager to learn more about this South American bioregion, which is quite high in the sky, like Bhutan in a lotta ways. The native Americans (a cultural label with a genetic overlay) have not surrendered their ways of life to the outsiders of more Eurasian extraction, but have blended or fused a synergetic coexistence that features an overhead tramway and max security prison.
Our presenters were to my way of thinking competent (as in professional) anthropologists (anthropology being the A in STEAM, intersecting with PATH as in Scrabble) and spoke responsibly of their own fears and trepidations, mixed with many joys and deep admiration for their hosts and guides. The culture was deeply egalitarian without a lot of the short circuits that come with social hierarchy. You greeted everyone, and everyone greeted you, vs finding out who the dignitaries were and just greeting them.
Given the audience were themselves Amigos (Friends) the presenters had easy access to a shoptalk we already shared, and so could characterize a specific gathering ritual, wherein participants contributed foods and so on, as a “potluck”, while immediately noticing the differences. “Potlatch” also comes to mind if you’re native American from these parts where I’m living (Pacific Northwest corner of Lower48 on those cable weather shows). However “potlatch” is more encompassing in terms of what gets sourced or traded.
Their trip (tour) was back in January (2026) so close to a year ago (we’re in late October). They’d delivered this slides before, just not to our group, Bridge City Friends. The presentation and slides were well organized. Larry shared the talk over Zoom and Rebecca, a program supervisor, chimed in at the end, as a next such not-missionary group is in the making (already full) for 2027.
I say “not-missionary” because Bolivians already have Quakers (Amigos) of the more evangelical variety meaning they aren’t in need of converting and besides, our brand of unprogrammed Friend don’t believe in mixing NGO work (let alone GO work) with proselytizing, a word I even have trouble spelling given how infrequently I use it (yes, I’m a Friend of the unprogrammed variety). On the contrary, the Prime Directive was in effect (alluding to Star Trek): the visit was not about being ambassadors of some spreading way of life the locals were expected to adopt. Bolivians don’t need fixing. They’re working it out just fine.
The tour was a 10-day whirlwind featuring visits to many micro-climates outside of La Paz. Political tensions resulted in Rebecca needing to reprogram their travel plans at the last minute. A lot of improv was going on, again a testament to the skill and flexibility of these travelers (wanderers).
I learned more from the presentation than I’ll attempt to chronicle in this Friendly journal post. I was grateful to have happened by with my camera. More usually I walk to a closer Meeting but the rains had come and I’d just been studying Trader Joe’s on social media and had a hankering to shop there on my way home. However the parking lot was packed and I decided to return at another time (like prolly today, the day after).
This morning I did my Sellwood Loop shortly after sunup (“sun-take”), a first serious road test of the new braking configuration.
Joe Bike needed to swap out the rear rack I’d earlier purchased, as the old one was interfering. I wasn’t charged for the replacement rack, as the first choice had been on their recommendation.
“Sun-take” and “sun-cut” come from poet Gene Fowler as I recall, an ex-con who’d remade himself on the inside by re-geniusing. I wasn’t so much a Church of Subgenius freak back then or I’d’ve made more jokes about getting up to sub-level myself.
Subs make “leaps” of (or into) genius, like a dolphin leaps, or a cow — over the moon. Gene was wanting to help Bucky with alternatives to “sunup” and “sundown” (ditto “sunrise” and “sunset”) given the z-axis bias built in (as if we all shared one).
We forget we each have a private z axis (z for zenith, directly overhead). The "up vs down" dichotomy is a bit suss, in other words, when we think that's what the sun must be doing. That's the joke about my "outstairs" versus "instairs" offices ("out vs in" being better than "up vs down" in a lotta ways).
The Sellwood Loop takes me by the abandoned Ross Island cement plant, which I’ve envisioned as a converted Parks n Rec utility, a place to fly (and sometimes crash) checked out drones. Some facilities are BYOD (the drones are user-provided).
Pilots typically favor abandoned, picturesque, buildings for their camera-equipped FPV drones, by now a popular genre on YouTube, with the video streams set to music.
Our notion of “picturesque” means “interesting” more than “calendar or postcard cute”, although it definitely includes the latter.
Once on the Orange Line Max, I fumbled with the iPhone hoping to buy a reserved seat for a showing of You Can See Everything. I’d be there now had the transaction worked. I believe what happened is I took too long futzing with entering the charge card.
The train came and I ended up starting over, trying to buy the same seat being held by my previously bungled attempt -- which eventually timed out, but not before I'd already blocked myself. Based on the bank statement, the amount went through, but was immediately refunded.
