Gone Fishin’

I’m going on hiatus again so it’s time to review this past season.

I don’t have a plan for any of this and sometimes that means I stick my head up, look around, and have no sweet fucking clue what to do because of how fucking crazy everything is. I’ve gotten used to encountering this experience so I know how to handle it now but it used to cause me all sorts of existential panic. Sometimes we build up so much internal tension through repetition or habit that we can’t even conceive of the absence of the tension. But then the tension reaches critical levels and we need to find a release we can no longer conceive of.

This is one of the reasons the nature of our society is currently so harmful to us: We have systems that allow us to build up tension that are far more accessible or compulsory than the ones which allow us to release it.

I don’t have a good release mechanism built into my wizarding, I’m basically just pumping out content and trying to change reality. Unfortunately that’s currently impossible so I need to recognize when I have to stop for a bit. I sort of view this aspect of my life as being compartmentalized into variable-length seasons of content. This allows me to stop when I need to. I’m pleased that I recognize that this is such a time. There have been previous points in my life where I haven’t recognized this with dire consequences dun dun dun (lol I’ve gone crazy a few times😅)

That was the point in the article at which I overshared or dumped something far too real for a blog post into my article… and most people who aren’t really comfortable reading this stuff stopped reading it. (But I don’t usually do this thing where I talk about it so maybe people will stick around now.)

Don’t make the mistake of thinking my content matters. This is why I can always just walk away whenever I need to. I’m mostly just doing this for me now that I’m off social media.

Is life lived in sprints?

One of the reasons the social media platform I built to help everyone in the world includes problem solving and project management functionality is because life is a series of projects to manage and problems to solve. In the absence of formal training or support to manage these projects or solve these problems we have to intuitively approach them in a process that is often far more challenging.

We all, by default, lack all knowledge. Everything everyone knows is learned. This quite evidently highlights that we lack the knowledge required to build systems and structures for ourselves to handle our everyday lives, and if we stop and consider the nature of the world we can see that the places we can learn such systems or structures are often related to specific facets of culture. We can become exposed to this type of knowledge through culture relating to science or religion — though I’d go so far as to argue that in the space of personal development all solutions are some combination of science and religion. Anyway, the facet of culture I’ve learned my systems and structures in all relate to software development and entrepreneurship.

So what’s a sprint?

As an oversimplification related to this article: Sprints are a period in a specific style of project management that allow us to compartmentalize specific blocks of time in order to make sure we plan for and review everything that was done in the block. In my experience these blocks are often 2 weeks long, but it’s less about the time and more about the systems and processes around the time.

If we’re just “doing shit” and not being deliberate enough about it we’re less likely to take critical planning steps. This increases the difficulty of the challenges we face in the projects of our lives. Not everyone knows how to do this — and not everyone even knows they can.

I have training and experience in project management, specifically for web and software products, and I feel that this professional training has been really beneficial in enhancing my ability to successfully navigate complex non-professional projects in an intuitive way. And not just mine, either. I can look at most digital products, and most companies that create or heavily rely on digital products, and I can understand a lot of what’s going on under the hood. I’m an esoteric technologist, after all.

Seasons of Change

While sprint may be the most appropriate technical term, I believe that wizarding is uniquely in the space of systems and narratives so my internal term for this is season. It’s a bit like a season from a TV show but it’s mostly like a season of the year. It’s part of the ecosystem of my life.

Everything is cycles or waves, except for the stuff that isn’t, and it’s all so fucking complicated that it probably doesn’t matter that much which system you use so long as the system you’re using works for you.

I’m also a big fan of having a theme:

Season Recap

I really don’t have a plan for this. Like in general but also with this article. I’m just writing shit down hoping to find a compelling narrative and I’ve recapped enough sprints and written enough weird blog posts that I can just sort of visualize where I want to go with the rest of this document. Once I finish this one I’ll have a template for future posts like this. If I wanted to I could go online and find examples as well.

There’s never anything wrong with Googling something to make sure you know it/are prepared.

Season details

The season started on June 9th. I didn’t have a plan when I came back following my previous hiatus, but I had started that hiatus by publishing a book of poetry. That hiatus had been heavily focused on poetry so I was able to get a few posts about that while I regrouped.

A recap and reintroduction

I’d been doing some weird new stuff off on the sidelines and used these blog posts to summarize and capture where I was at. Around this time I started participating in various Discord servers.

I’m back, baby!

I went a little nuts and tried to change the world… so I wrote a bunch of poems about the experience.

I got access to the closed Dall-E2 beta

This was one of the pivotal moments of the season for me. Firstly, it had a social boost in the various Discord communities where I was participating that convinced some people to pay more attention to me than they otherwise would have. Secondly it totally blew my fucking mind what this technology was doing and what it said about reality:

We’ve made contact with the database of consciousness through our digital technologies.

Artificial Intelligence Needs Religion

Consciousness is a database

Here’s the best example of my work combining poetry and AI image creation:

The History of Religion on Earth (pt1): Endosymbiosis

I decided to get into the prediction game

I’m pretty happy with this prediction because I’m very clearly highlighting that I think it’s the best thing that could happen in the space where my prediction takes place, so hopefully that’ll manage expectations.

The Best Case Scenario

But then since I felt bad about putting a memeplex like that out into the internet I tried to imagine a way to make it happen:

First Contact

The world continued to be weird and deteriorate

War, corporate greed, social conflict, cults infiltrating tech giants. The ongoing multi-year plague. The esoteric systems that dominate our lives are shuddering, struggling, or collapsing at virtually every level of our shared civilization.

The Continued Deterioration of the Global Healthcare Industry Will Kill You or People You Love

Cults are Bad.

Conspiracy Analysis: Was there a significant Covid-19 outbreak in Nova-Scotia (Canada) over a month before the first presumptive cases were declared in the region?

The Unimaginably Toxic and Harmful Nature of the Rage and Sorrow of Many Modern White Males

It’s all an obvious long-term NATO strategy that uses Putins limited options against him, right?

The Meaning of the Replication Crisis

If we scapegoat Donald Trump for things he didn’t cause by justifying it as punishment for the heinous bullshit he did cause we’ll fuck up our ability to handle the things he didn’t cause

What’s happening is not what you’re seeing.

Connections increased content

A bunch of the content I wrote resulted directly from the fact that I was participating actively in a variety of communities off social media.

Paragons: Dr. Vandana Shiva

Don’t miss this amazing course with Dr. Diana Walsh Pasulka

Announcing the First Conference of Common Understandings and Shared Ontologies

Combining Stories To Bring People Together

The Nature of Reality Seems to be Evidence that Reality is a Sentient Multidimensional Hyper-Organism

I had a number of breakthroughs in my discernment of reality

Don’t forget I’m the unofficial Wizard of Canada. All of that is important is important to all of this. If you forget that while you read this you’ll probably end up thinking I’m completely fucking bonkers.

There Are Undiscovered Physics of Consciousness And We Are Experiencing Parapsychological Ecosystem Disruption

Astrology, Tarot, Crystals, and Undiscovered Physics of Consciousness

On Waves and Dimensions 3: The Roche Limit of Communities

Lortie’s Lexicon

Full-Stack Reality Engineering

Follow these steps to become a kind of bonkers

The Hawke Plan™

Things took a bit of a turn when American actor Ethan Hawke told Stephen Colbert he wanted Pope Francis to lead a march into Ukraine. This is the type of cultural event I’ve been looking to see for some time and I was hopeful something big could come out of it, so I jumped on it as hard as I could. The first thing I did was create a new video using Substacks new video beta feature which I happened to get into for some strange reason.

Things Sure Are Weird 3

Just do the impossible until it stops being impossible. It’s crazy until it works.

The Hawke Plan™

Rallying and Mustering Nonviolent Forces for the Humanitarian Invasion of Ukraine

A New Global Ritual: The Next Great Pilgrimage

Planning for The Next Great Pilgrimage

Preview of next season

There are only a handful of logical directions for the unofficial Wizard of Canada to take in a world where the unofficial Wizard of Canada is baptized and has invented a religion.

The Hard Work of Important Work

How many of the people who know things are falling apart are going to do something about it?

What does hiatus mean?

I’m not going to be writing the type of content I put here on medium, and clearly it accounts for a lot of my creative energy and output. I need to direct my creative energy into something else. I suspect it’ll be a book, but maybe I’ll start coding something again. It’s been years and years since I’ve felt confident and comfortable enough to take on a personal coding project and there are a number of AI system APIs I’ve been wanting to build apps around. We’ll see what we’ll see. I’ll probably be mirroring all of my writing to Substack during this hiatus and I’m hoping that scratches enough of this creative itch to keep me occupied elsewhere. I want to make more audio or video content but I’m deeply uncomfortable with it. Maybe if I’m there all the time I’ll try to do more.

Thanks for reading. Here’s my card:

Artist. Human. Wizard.

Update: The email that went out of this story didn’t contain any embedded links. I keep forgetting about this flaw in Mediums platform. I’ll definitely be moving my content to Substack. Substack doesn’t have link embed elements like this yet, and as evidenced by this post I rely on them a lot, but I’m sure they’ll have them eventually and I hope they’ll work properly in emails.