2026-03-18 23:24:00
My favorite Anarchist youtuber Andrewism dropped this video a couple of days ago. It was a great video that I recommend you watch, talking about subjects such as Animism, how states relied on and manipulated religion to legitimize authority and patriarchal standards, etc. The main point that I wanted to talk about is religion and why I think atheists/nihilists should take some pointers from religion and what I think would be a good "religious" practice we should pull from.
I'm an atheist. I'm also an absurdist. I recognize this tension between peoples yearning for transcendent/objective meaning and a universe which offers none. In a post-god-is-dead world, more and more people are becoming lucid to this understanding.
Absurdists choose to stare at this tension in the face and rebel against it by living life to the fullest and embracing the natural world in spite of the inherent lack of meaning. They don't try and find meaning to try and resolve this conflict, we find fulfillment in spite of the lack of objective meaning.
Religion might seem incompatible with this notion at first glance. As it seems that supernatural forces/mysticism/mythology all seem to underpin religion. However, religion can/should exist without supernatural elements.
From the book Atheopaganism, religion can be defined as a combination of cosmology (the belief of the nature of the universe/afterlives/etc.), ideology (values/morals/sacredness), and practice (festivals/rituals/prayer/etc.).
For nihilists/atheists/existentialist/absurdists, we already have defining cosmology in our understanding of the science behind how the universe came to be, acknowledging a lack of objective meaning, and a dismissal of the existence of a god or afterlife. We also all have defining morals/values that come about through intuition, human instinct, and rational speculation/dialog. However the thing we are missing is the last part, the practice. The rituals/prayers/whatever.
Ritual I think is the lynchpin in this whole thing. It brings the ideology and cosmology together and manifests it into reality. It is entirely possible to pray, knowing full well that it will do nothing, but understanding the value in getting your deepest hopes out in the open.
When I was in an existential hole, I attempted to do the Kierkegaardian "leap of faith". I tried to adopt Christianity for a brief period, even considered baptism. Emphasis on tried though, because I quickly found out that there was way too much I couldn't reconcile about religion. It is REALLY hard to try and gaslight yourself into believing in a supernatural, all-powerful, all-loving god that tells you your queer friends are an abomination and does nothing about the pedophilic elite trafficking and doing unspeakable horrors to children. I do quite like that Jesus fellow, though. Or at least much of what he supposedly taught.
During this period, I prayed almost every night. I prayed for warmth for people sleeping out in the cold, for food for those who had none, I prayed for my wife and daughter to sleep safe, and I prayed for the safety of those caught in the midst of a warzone.
I was aware this would go absolutely nowhere, but I still think there is value in getting your thoughts out in the open and hearing yourself speak of what you hope to see in the world. It can help you paint a clearer picture of what your core values are.
I pretty quickly abandoned Christianity when I realized it wasn't going to cut it for me for various reasons. And not long after I actually finished reading Camus' works. Which turned me into an absurdist.
My wife and I came across a video about a year later about raising kids as an atheist/nihilist/absurdist/etc. One of the recommendations was to set some ritual in your lives. So, my wife and I started with 2 things, both of which were her idea. Making Sunday a "sacred" day, where we turn off screens (that part is still a work in progress) and making a big breakfast in the morning. The other is treating my dad's birthday like a soft holiday where we all go out to dinner (I'm expanding on this idea as well, considering setting up playlists for music my dad loved. In a similar spirit to Christmas music coming around for Christmas).
What you decide should ultimately be up to you and what works for your lifestyle, but this sort of practice can actually add some added fulfillment into your life. It doesn't have to be anything crazy, can just be a simple walk in nature.
You might be someone who might find some enjoyment in joining an establishment like The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, The Satanic Temple, there might be a Unitarian Universalist (an atheistic religion that focuses on deeds and social justice) church in your area worth checking out. Or you can keep this as some personal spiritual journey.
Like Andrewism, I'm interested in the religion of Atheopaganism. It's cosmology treats the natural world as the only thing that exists. So, no Heaven or Hell, no all-powerful God watching and weeping at you blasting rope to Waluigi porn. It bases cosmology on scientific discovery and inquiry. It bases it's values on 4 pillars: life, beauty, truth, and love. There are 13 principles, but Andrewism succinctly curates them into 3 groups: knowing, relating, and doing.
Does this fit with my absurdist existential views? Absolutely. I can live in accordance to an Atheopagan religion lifestyle and still maintain full lucidity that it basically means nothing, but it amplifies my rebellion. Camus spoke of people like the Conqueror or Don Juan. Who grew their empire and gave love freely, respectively, knowing full well it all means nothing in the grand scheme of things. I think the point of humility that Andrewism brings up (recognizing who we are in the grand scheme of others and the universe) is in-line with Camus' call for solidarity with fellow sufferers in the Absurd.
This all culminates in the reverence for the giant floating rock we find ourselves floating on. The beauty in the natural world, and how treating it as sacred can produce action against agents that would defile it.
Finally, the doing part. Which is probably the hardest for most people. It's the anarchist calisthenics. Picking up trash in a park without expecting approval or praise. Feeding people living on the streets without shoving a camera in their face for internet clout. Solidarity with others who are in functionally the same boat as you. Being a person of integrity. Doing what you can to dismantle systems that exploit others and nature. Creating art. Engaging in community.
So, we have cosmology and ideology, what about the point of ritual? Ritual can be pretty much anything. You can treat Sunday as a sacred day where you completely shut off screens and engage with loved ones, maybe turning on some music, dancing, and reading. Meditation to build awareness of your mind and body. You can put ritual in cooking. For an example of this I recommend watching the sandwich scene from Adventure Time.
Andrewism brings up how Atheopaganism advocates for rituals for birth, coming of age, gender transitions, etc. and how it emphasizes yearly observances grounded in the changes in seasons/equinoxes/solstices/honoring our ancestors and the dead/etc.
Overall, I think this is something I am wanting to dive more into and implement in my life and I think fits well with my personality. I might do some blog writing about some of my practices when they come around.
Anyway, thanks for reading all this. Hope you got something out of it.
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I still feel like I'm in recovery from my rather sleepless Monday night. I was so exhausted all of Tuesday that I asked to do WFH because I didn't trust myself for the hour commute to work. Hadn't been that tired since my daughter was born. I'm doing better today, but still feel tired. Got a Halo 3 game night tonight that I'm looking forward to.
2026-03-18 14:58:00
Every once in a while, i see a blogpost like the one that chunk of coal recently made, treating bear like a social media platform. it's always a reminder that social media has kind of conditioned our brains to feel entitled to others attention on sites like these.
But here's the secret, right: You don't actually need toasts. They don't do anything. Bear doesn't even display the total number your blog has.
I mean, seriously. Noone is getting paid for this (apart from herman, i suppose) - it doesn't matter if people upvote your stuff. Your lifelyhood doesn't depend on it, there's no path to stardom here. It's a hobby. Who cares what number of trending your post inhabits.
If you don't like the content that's on trending, just use any of the dozens of content aggregation websites you can find on the web. Have a look at powrss or something.
Traditional social media has kind of conditioned everybody to see this sort of thing as their job, to sort of unconsciously put the people at the top of trending onto some sort of pedestal - "look guys, those are the bearblog celebrities!".
No, they're just random people that also do this as a hobby. You're not going to get "canceled" on bearblog, no one's gonna get their lives ruined by hundreds of people when a "popular" blogger calls them out. I don't have the numbers exactly, but there's like, what? At total of 500, 600 active users on here? People will get annoyed at your post and move on, there's no secret Bearblogging shadow cabal or whatever.
Trending doesn't always show the stuff that i most enjoy reading, heck, most of the time it doesn't do that. But that's what most recent is for. You're not owed attention, there's no attention economy here, because, again, you're not getting paid for this.
Sure, it feels nice to know other people like your stuff, I get that. But it doesn't serve anyone to get this upset over it, to try and act like simultaneously you don't care about toasts and they're Bad And Evil actually, and then to turn around and say you're also entitled to more of them. The existence of the toast system doesn't "force" you to do anything. Turn it off if you don't want it. There's a bunch of userscripts for that, i think I've even made one before.
Stop treating bearblog like a job. You're not gonna "hit it big" here of all places. Have some fun, enjoy your time here, maybe email some people with likeminded interests. Getting upset over the number of toasts other people receive is just about the most pointless thing you could be doing. You aren't entitled to other people's attention.
2026-03-18 13:04:00
It's been nearly seven months??? since we moved away from our apartment so that we could, basically, replace all the surfaces in the the kitchen and bathroom. Finally, finally, we are almost able to move back in.
We enjoy the good fortune of having family nearby who liked us enough to let us move in during construction. There were a couple chunks of time when we were renting a place in Westwood, but we've mostly been in San Gabriel.
But now the work is done; the only thing we are missing is a refrigerator. But we can live without that... for about two days at a time, because I still need insulin, and that needs to be refrigerated. So we have begun to move back in this week.
Our other good fortune is that we own the apartment. The downside is that we have no landlord to give us a "landlord's special" renovation, and we in fact have to pay if we want anything fixed. Paying for stuff is the kind of thing that, as an indie dev, you kind of want to avoid. So the place has been basically untouched, and all the appliances and a maybe even a lot of the paint was original to the 1960s. There was a massive amount of water damage in the bathroom from our upstairs neighbors, whose five year old once ran the sink for so long that he managed to destroy our entire bathroom somehow. It was kind of like living in a cave!
The contractors did however successfully remove all that and replace all the walls and floors in the kitchen and bathroom. So now the sacs of hanging paint are gone, and some of the surfaces have tiles on them now instead of linoleum, which is very cool. Tiles are great. I have decided that I love tiles.
But now every single thing we own is covered in poisonous dust from drywall or from cutting tiles. Nobody warned me that that would be a thing! Our entire apartment has only three rooms in it, and every single room seems to have had drywall or tiles cut inside it. So now we have to wipe down everything we own. Soooooo we are just running a CR box again.
The trusty CR box... good for more than just wildfires and COVID!!!
2026-03-18 12:00:00
The recent video from Digital Foundry in which founder Richard Leadbetter and producer Oliver Mackenzie tout NVIDIA’s manufactured-for-investors GDC tech demo misleadingly named DLSS 5 was not a surprising debacle. Since the site went independent in August 2025, decisions that could once be excused by the corporate sway of IGN instead exposed the ideological underpinnings of the tech-obsessed worldview the outlet elevates. The only difference this time was the backlash.
Reactions to DLSS 5 across the social internet evinced that we were all seeing the same thing. Something abhorrent and gross, yes, but also blown out and too bright. Yassified. Slop. Beyond criticism of the product, people were also critical of NVIDIA and what it is doing to the world, the industry, and to people with its AI. To put it plainly, what DLSS 5 does to the image of female bodies in videogames is misogyny the likes of which was previously reserved for female protagonists and their actresses at the center of Gamergate’s discourse du jour. Digital Foundry, however, saw something else: the future (a mirage), artistic intention (a farce), the real deal (we’ll see). Their YouTube video has over 64,000 dislikes. Comments on their website, social media, and the video are filled with people derisively calling their coverage an ad. Clearly, Digital Foundry’s audience is not seeing what they’re seeing either.
I can't tell you how NVIDIA almost got away with letting Digital Foundry blow smoke for their mirror creations so repulsive it has already sent CEO Jensen Huang into panicked damage control while simultaneously laundering the credibility of Digital Foundry’s entire staff. The question I am concerned with answering is: From where is Digital Foundry looking at DLSS 5 that it sees something entirely different than what you and I do?
In Digital Foundry’s 2023 “tech review” of Hogwarts Legacy, Leadbetter called the game “a beautiful, expansive piece of fan service…likely to seriously impress those deeply into the Wizarding World” that was difficult to reconcile with ”the range of performance issues it has on the Xbox consoles.” While almost every other major outlet covered Hogwarts Legacy in some capacity, some at least acknowledged—if not outright grappled with—its connection to JK Rowling amidst the anti-trans backlash in the U.K. she was funding with her Harry Potter fortune. (It was a damning moment for the mediascape as a whole, which did the bare minimum to bend to the online outrage of trans and allied content creators, gamers, and readers.) Since then, Digital Foundry’s YouTube channel has published five more videos about the game’s performance on different consoles, and has used it in other videos as a go-to reference point for new hardware (including in the DLSS 5 video).
The fixation on Hogwarts Legacy never sat well, but it was at least possible to imagine Digital Foundry was simply in the position of needing to meet certain viewership requirements or that it had been given a corporate mandate to cover the game. Since going indie, however, coverage of the game has continued. It’s the same story with Digital Foundry’s coverage of Microsoft published games during the BDS boycott of Xbox: It has been ignored without so much as the courtesy acknowledgement progressive outlets feel the need to perform. Silence was once excusable under corporate oversight, but is no longer permissible for the indie publication.
I wish that praising DLSS 5 was not a more immediately recognizable dereliction of journalistic duty than ignoring Hogwarts Legacy’s material impact on trans people in the U.K. or Starfield’s laundering a corporate reputation for surveilling civilians in Gaza and the West Bank. It is certainly, however, the endpoint of Digital Foundry’s tech fetishism. All that’s left when you ignore the political, social, gendered, raced, and environmental impacts of technology and games is tech boosterism. How many strikes are these men permitted before they can no longer plead ignorance for advancing Gamergate talking points?
Learning to practice solidarity and feminism 101 seems like a small task compared to the knowledge and skillset for producing accessible, informative tech videos that Digital Foundry has cultivated, but we have to believe that it is possible to produce quantitative analyses of videogame hardware and software while living consistently with a belief in the self-determination of Palestinians and trans people and basic respect for women—people who Digital Foundry should at least care about as colleagues, audience members, and subscribers.
That might begin with incredulity. Leadbetter wrote in his coverage “there could be some comparisons to generative AI” before Huang admitted in a statement that DLSS 5 “[blends] hand-crafted rendering with generative AI.” Digital Foundry clearly noticed the similarities, but seemingly took NVIDIA at its word that this was an iteration on DLSS lighting tech. It should also start with articulating what we all see: the misogyny built into this technology that reshapes women to look more fuckable to the worst men on the internet.
It will include covering into the future how the technology they are interested in materially impacts the world you and I move through at a higher cost due to these corporations. It would seek to disavow the chauvinism of trolls who invoke euphemisms about keeping politics out of games and the inevitability of generative AI. And it would acknowledge that there are no charts or spreadsheets we can retreat into to avoid standing for something.
To do anything less would be cowardly.
2026-03-18 08:54:00
How to propose in 8 easy steps:
Step 1: Give no indication that you are ready to propose. Act a little blasé or disinterested whenever any related conversations come up. Say that you're definitely not going to do it while travelling New Zealand and Australia.
Step 2: Order a ring and get it shipped to NZ. Faff around with DHL's unhelpful customs import process and get the forms filled out.
Step 3: Secretly hide the ring in a camera battery charging case.
Step 4: Wake up at 3am and drive down the coast to Kaikōura. Walk part way up Mt Fyffe to a wonderfully scenic view point.
Step 5: Set up your camera to "film the sun rising".
Step 6: Watch the sun rise. Enjoy the colours in the sky. Enjoy each other's company. Enjoy the moment.
Step 7: Get on one knee and ask the question. Hold back the tears and get the words out.
Step 8: Wait for her to say yes.
(She said yes).
2026-03-18 07:34:00
Last week J learned that he was to be laid off, not long after his five-year anniversary. A few days after that E found out that the company she and M work at is going to be laying off 20% of their workforce to offset AI spending, which by my estimates means that there's roughly a 36% chance one of them will be affected. E thinks her own odds are worse, since she's been struggling to keep up with pace. So J has been scrambling to get his last few medical and dental appointments in before his last day and preparing for interviews and E is mentally bracing to join him.
I learned some of this on a long subway ride this weekend, and the news hit a little too close to home. Two others in my close circle have also been looking for work for a while now; everyone else is worried about joining them. It's cruel, we say, looking back ruefully at how we all defected from what we wanted to do to computer science because it was supposed to be the safe choice. Now it's anything but.
I don't even work in the industry anymore and I'm worried. It feels like the walls are closing in. It's hard not to when you see people around you get laid off left and right. In a 1-on-1 this week one of the senior members on my team expressed that he was worried that our jobs might be made redundant by AI too, and that the only thing keeping us from getting replaced might be the higher-ups' unwillingness to do the dirty work of prompting these AI tools themselves.
While we haven't done layoffs at work, the pressure to use AI to increase our productivity at work is mounting. As someone who doesn't enjoy using AI, I find it hard to keep up. So much of my day is now spent looking for ways we can better cajole this probabilistic black box into simulating the work I was hired to do. I don't want to spend my hours doing this. I want to choose the words myself. Isn't that what you hired me to do?
Back when I was interviewing for this job I have now, one of the many hoops they made me jump through was a set of asynchronous, unproctored recorded interview questions and writing assessments. They notified me that I had two days to do all this in an email I received an hour before I was supposed to leave for vacation. What the hell, I thought, as I put my bags down and pulled on a collared shirt. In my hurry I answered the canned interview questions in a single take, used ChatGPT to help me with the writing prompts (this was the first time I had ever used the tool, mind you), and sent them off before I jetted off for vacation.
Later, they asked if I had used AI on that writing assessment. I had completed it in "significantly less time" than the other candidates. I saw no reason to dissimulate and told them that I had. I thought that was going to be the end of the road then, but it didn't end up mattering because (i) they would put me through another proctored writing assessment later, and (ii) I later found out that my current director defended my AI use as "productive" and said that it showed I was resourceful.
He brings this tale up along with my technical background every time he taps me to spearhead AI initiatives. It is difficult not to choke on the irony. Even as an avowed naysayer and skeptic I use these tools so much at work, much more than I would like. I worry they are eroding my ability to think (and consequently, write).
From the outside I write for a living. What really happens is I go to work to coax what looks like writing from a black box and then I go home to practice the actual work of writing. It is a strange, strange existence. Of course I wish it weren't so but I also wish that we wouldn't drop bombs on children in foreign countries and ravage the one planet we can live on — in the end, what good does all this unfulfilled desire do?