September: I the 97th poet

Cambridge (UK) is tiny and pleasant and dry.

• The Meridian Office people were very welcoming, gave me my own key as soon as I crossed the door frame. Drop by!

• University life is very bad in lots of ways (penny-pinching, terrible offices, appalling IT, insane amounts of paperwork, insane amounts of meetings)

• The most recent meeting had a couple of very admirable parts though:

  • You can force your papers to have impact by volunteering for governmental initiatives and making them do what your paper finds. (e.g. making the OECD's evals do instance-by-instance results rather than pure aggregates)

  • A guy just up and offered me a postdoc, $250k over 3 years. Pretty sure there wouldn't be much stress or process to it — but I am too disloyal and feral to take any job now.

  • Guy turned down OpenAI (c. $1m) in favour of his $60k prof spot because they could not assure him enough intellectual freedom. Very impressive.
    

Arb hired a wonderful ops person. Grownup in the room!

• I feel about 20% larger now that I don’t have to store the state of the company on my own and nag people.
  

I attended my first larp, “97 Poets of Revachol”. The Disco Elysium setting was enough to overcome my huge prejudice against (what I wrongly predicted would be) the shallowness and affectedness of the performers.

• Venue was perfect, a 200-room derelict hospital with deep cobwebs and lead paint. Most people slept in it for 3 nights, on thin but new mattresses.

• My fellow performers were mostly very good. For some it’s their 60th performance.

• I was an old mystic convinced that he must obtain followers because only he knew the Truth. The main challenge and thrill of the play was intellectual for me: I had to come up with a whole metaphysical system and derive my politics from it. I ended up as a Literalist Hegelian whose position that death is not real made him indifferent to the violence around him.

• Some very impressive parts, like the opt-in box on the application form if you wanted a modernist larp:

  > The Hideout game is very specific, and its design centers around waiting, slow tension, claustrophobic relationships, and boredom.

I defended my PhD in the British Library. Pass with minor mods. It was actually fun!

• Also my extern looked and sounded exactly like Terry Pratchett.

• They did the classic thing of asking me to leave for 2 mins then saying “come in Dr Leech”

  • If you catch me using the title outside of 1) GP appointments; 2) airlines; 3) testimony to Congress then please give me a slap.

• It has been 5 years exactly. I am unrecognisable. (That’s more to do with Arb than the PhD but still.) There has been a nagging ache in my head for 5 years which has abruptly stopped. The sense of lightness and satisfaction is for now all I need.

• And inherent power, self-horsepower. I look at all my new mental resources, not quite recognising the turbo and the fenders and the new titanium cylinders. Is that all there is to a terminal degree?

• I am glad to have written down a lot of stuff about the pain and confusion and waste so that my conceited remembering-self will not think he sailed through and not delude you that the gains involved are cheap.

• I am glad that my phd is over so that I can resume my actual education.
  

Three words I learned this month

• Lawtaker (n.): the complement of lawmakers.

• Depopulate (v.). To kill an entire factory farm because of disease, as opposed to "processing" which is to kill an entire factory farm gradually. See also liquidate, from Russian ликвиди́ровать.

• Agrivoltaics (n.): the engineering field of using the same land for solar and food at the same time.

I spent way too much time on Twitter and Youtube this month and have blocked both of them. But there are some bangers if you scroll.

I commissioned Jooda to slightly rationalise my psychotic 8 year old CSS. Reasonable rates!

I forgot my charger and spent about 9 hours completely unplugged (no phone, no laptop, no ereader even). It was very strong. I read two books.

Links

• This is very cool, for the kind of person I still hope to be.

• Liam is the best widescreen writer on philosophy, though very depressive.

• Zvi’s taxonomy of current social classes (The Village, The River, The Wilderness, The Vortex) has lodged in my mind. Zvi is a riverine supremacist. I have some hope of bridging all of them.

• Heath is breathtaking too

I am on track to listen to 1000 new albums this year. Favourites this month:

• Mike Min

• Charly García

• Kevin Sherwin

• Farida Amadou

For the first time ever, I am throwing a big birthday party for myself. This weekend, a big 10 bedroom victorian schoolhouse Airbnb, everyone brings ingredients and cooks for each other for 3 days. About $1200 not counting everyone else’s travel. Bargain.

Currently racing to submit 3 ICLR papers for various people. But this acute and tractable eustress is simply nothing to the chronic distress of the PhD. I wonder how long this stoic adaptation will last.