Second Coming of (Distributed) Christ (Consciousness). Alex Zhu on Wednesday 2/4 at 11:30 AM CT

A math and compsci guy tries to integrate mysticism and spirituality into a rigorous epistemic and a rational worldview.

Who am I? Great to meet everyone here!

I wanted to take a moment to to let you all know a bit about myself.

I am an entrepreneur that wears a lot of hats. I am a Realtor, insurance agent, content creator on Twitch and YouTube, and professional dungeon master. 

I am so looking forward to connecting with you all here. Let’s grow together!

Who am I? Great to meet everyone here!

I wanted to take a moment to to let you all know a bit about myself.

I am an entrepreneur that wears a lot of hats. I am a Realtor, insurance agent, content creator on Twitch and YouTube, and professional dungeon master. 

I am so looking forward to connecting with you all here. Let’s grow together!

Reading as Interaction, as Encounter. This is something I've been reflecting on, and which I wish had been shown/taught to me earlier.

I used to think of books as something like repositories. Of knowledge stuff, of stories, of experience.

And so reading was like a process of extraction. Extract entertainment, joy, information, knowledge. Get thee into the reading mines!

Note: this model of what reading is isn't wrong. It captures some important things, but it feels incomplete. And leads to bad pedagogy, I think.

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Now I see reading as interaction.

A book (or piece of media, or person, or world) is no longer a static repository. It's a potential. 

What feels more important now is the reading itself, the whole process of encountering material and, well, meeting it. 

This feels like it opens up more possibilities. There are certainly uncountably many kinds or modes of encounter, but here's one that has been very rewarding: treating reading as conversation. How do I respond to this idea, this turn of phrase? What does it make me think of and feel? How am I implicated by this? What is it missing? What does it point me toward?

This makes reading different. Slower, in many ways, but more rewarding. I'm more engaged, and putting more of myself into the reading, which seems to result in getting more out of it.

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This leads me to something I want. I want there to be recorded traces of readings (this is what notes/marginalia are, in a way), performances of reading.

The performance would not be like a poetry reading, restricted to just the text, but like a public performance of an individual's (or group's) live encounter – including thoughts/asides/etc.

I want this to exist for two reasons: (1) I wish I had learned about this way of reading much much earlier in my life. So having examples of this and venerating it might help more people encounter this way of reading sooner. (2) I want traces of past encounters, for historical reasons. I want to be able to see how my (or our) relationship to a text has changed over time. 

On intimacy and sex in movies and TV. I was watching a movie a few weeks ago, and after a reunion thing between a man and a woman happened, there was this implied sense of knowing each other, of real connection, and then they immediately jumped into bed.  Something about this seemed totally off, and it occurred to me that sex in TV and movies is often used as a substitute for 'real' intimacy, that bc intimacy is so hard to do in real life, and likely harder in film, it's easier to just represent it with sex.

I suspect this has had a knock-on affect in that in consuming such representation, people have learned that the thing you do when you want to feel really connected/intimate with someone, is sleep with them.  Ofc, this isn't the height of intimacy, but a pale reflection of what is possible, and it's ability to create a sense of connection varies wildly.

When is it appropriate to imitate someone’s accent? . I’m next to a teacher on a plane that is imitating one of her student’s accents as she tells a story. My immediate reaction is to cringe. It doesn’t seem too relevant to the story, but she isn’t mocking her or anything. It’s true that the student is from a different country than ours. Anyway. What do you think? 

The Diplomat is amazing. The Netflix show, The Diplomat is amazing. I love it – it ticks all of my boxes for suspense, romance, intrigue, and things I can’t name.

Did you see it, did you like it?

I’m watching A Discovery of Witches and also enjoying that, but both Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches and Interview with a Vampire are sadly proving unwatchable.
Love to hear what you’re watching and loving

It's too intimidating for men to be men. Alright, here’s one of my most controversial opinions, and I’m gonna try to take the filter off as much as possible:

Feminism has played out as retribution instead of solution. The Barbie movie is an entirely thorough example of what I’m talking about. You suppressed us, so we’re gonna use any means necessary to take over. And then they recreated the same imbalance in its opposite.

I see most social movements do this too. True solutions to imbalances aren’t fair because they don’t have human-enacted payback. You suppressed us, so we’re going to move toward balance.

I’ve been spending about 2 years trying to set aside my learned default into my masculine energy (having grown up in highly feminist orange/green) and learn how to root in my feminine. But my feminine longs for a tether to something rooted. Masculine energy feels rooted, solid, grounded, and my feminine very much doesn’t (though it is held by a spacious ok-ness, but it’s so airy it easily gets chaotic when not balanced in connection with a grounded masculine.)

But I’ve had a hell of a time finding grounded healthy masculine men. Many of them can do it for a time, but then flee to an extreme, like angry resentment at one end and non-binary softness at the other end. And I think it’s because the culture has become super aggressive to men who are solidly men.