2025-12-06 19:38:00
I was out with two former colleagues yesterday. Same thing a couple of months ago, but from another workplace. And last month with three friends from my childhood.
All these people have one thing in common. They make up about ten percent of the total group of people I spent time with during each of those periods.
Is it because of common interests? Somewhat, but it’s far from the whole answer. Maybe because of distance? Nope, these people are scattered across quite a large area.
I believe it comes down to the Swedish term lagom (just the right amount). Not in terms of the actual number of people, but how much time we spend together. We talk, text, and meet in a way I feel is lagom.
As soon as I feel a kind of neediness in people, that constant pull for attention and interaction, I keep my distance. Otherwise, I get drained. It gets too much for me to handle.
So I’m subconsciously cautious, guided more by feelings than facts.
And somehow, it lands at ten percent being lagom.
2025-12-06 07:33:00
📌 Like the last time I did something like this, I meant to write about it the day of (yesterday)... but after more than 9 hours of activity, I completely knocked out the moment I finished and got myself together.
I do a lot of counting, whether it’s counting up or counting down. This one commemorates a pretty life-changing moment: it’s been 100 days since my job essentially broke up with me. It’s no secret how much that’s affected me (a quick look at my posts over the last 100 days would tell you everything), so I figured I’d take something a little depressing and pair it with a goal I’ve been trying to hit for years, and make this the year I finally did it.
I slowly built up to this mileage. In Q1 I hit 25 miles, Q2 was 50, Q3 was 75 (my longest up until now), and I was determined to make Q4 the quarter I finally reached a century ride.
Yesterday, I did exactly that. I rode over 100 miles. I had 2 goals: ride 100 miles and keep my moving time under 7 hours. As you’ll see from the stats below, I managed to hit both.
I took a reasonable number of breaks -- every 15–20 miles I’d stop for about 5–10 minutes to stretch/rest my legs. My longest break was around 30–45 minutes for lunch so I could carb load, but otherwise I kept things pretty consistent. It was exhausting, but the feeling of accomplishment at the end made every grueling mile towards the end worth it.
Today, I’m honestly not that sore (though 2 day delays are a real thing), but my whole body feels tired. I’m giving myself the day to rest and will pick up my running program again in a few days.
♾️ Related: 75 Miles Completed
2025-12-06 02:44:13
There is no escape of the frequent comparisons of supposedly immature rich and powerful people to none other than children. If they’re not compared to children, then certainly called mentally ill, immature or cognitively maladjusted. I should not have to explain why this is harmful to children and the mentally ill, but unfortunately I do. Not only are these comparisons perpetuating a stigma that mentally ill people are evil, it is diminishing the capabilities of these ultrarich and extremely powerful people turning them into a spectacle to ridicule, not to combat.
People like Trump, Musk, Thiel, Gates, Zuckerberg, etc. are not comparable to any other group, least of all to the ones I listed above. They are mature adults capable of making decisions and, for all we know, are mentally sane. Them acting in ways we (on the political left) disapprove of does not negate their sanity nor their maturity. That group of people simply has more power than any of us could fathom. Their decisions and actions are not only rational, they’re to be expected from people who have attained and are in those positions, and that’s the danger. If we keep ridiculing their actions as immature or mentally ill, we are reinforcing the assumption that any human could be “good” with power over others. You have to have been evil to attain it at all! We lose sight of what it means to think you are above almost everyone else. Most dangerously, though, we lose sight of what it means to have a society in which some people have the power to substantially dictate the way life is lived by others, for better or for worse. There is no way in which any of this could be “made” “good”.
I realize that a great many of the voices singing those comparisons like a choir are only doing so to make sense of the fucked up reality we live in. That is an explanation of their behavior, though never an excuse. By comparing these power-holders to children they are inadvertently implying they’re developmentally disabled since to all eyes, their bodies look fully developed, however, if the critics are to be believed, physical appearances do not match their targets’ mental abilities. Combined with the source of these comparisons frequently coming from the left where that social class is commonly considered evil, you are lumping it together with those most vulnerable to the harmful decisions sponsored by the group you are supposedly attacking. You are only harming those who have nothing to do with this!
If you are living in some kind of alternate universe in which children attain positions of power where they are not only capable of commanding people, there are millions of them choosing to subject themselves to their command, I’d like to interview you.
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2025-12-05 01:55:00
I started this blog to document and reflect on random moments from my life. Eventually to find that it was a poor medium for doing so.
Though anonymous (to a certain degree), my page is public facing. No matter how much I tell myself to not care, I do care. I reword, reorganize, and cut out the "boring parts". It takes more energy than I would like and is too slow. So many times I've been working on one post, but want to write several others. It's impossible.
On a whim I bought a paper journal a few weeks ago. I thought it'd be mostly the same, but no.
I like to write using pen. A consequence of which is that I can't change what I write. What comes down are my thoughts, and will stay as exactly those thoughts I had in that moment of time. I frequently write down a bunch of redundant stuff, sometimes entire pages of reasoning I realize later are completely useless. But they will stay just as they are.
No editing, no subconscious worrying about what people think. Unexpectedly, it really felt like an order of magnitude in energy saved. I eagerly write nearly every day now. That's a long way from how often I wrote before.
Who could have known that using an actual journal is the purest form of journaling?
2025-12-04 18:45:00
I. Vivimos en la era de la recomendación algorítmica. Sistemas que filtran y jerarquizan la información que consumimos a diario están constantemente presentes. Plataformas digitales como redes sociales, servicios de streaming o tiendas on-line nos ofrecen contenidos personalizados en función de nuestros datos y comportamientos previos. Esta omnipresencia, además de reorganizar el acceso a la información, transforma la forma en que construimos nuestra percepción del mundo y de nosotros mismos.
Los algoritmos actúan como espejos que nos devuelven reflejos de nuestras preferencias, hábitos, gustos (incluso, prejuicios). Cada vez que scrolleamos, el sistema nos sugiere contenido adaptado a nuestros intereses, y tomamos esas sugerencias porque en ese reflejo digital reconocemos rasgos de nosotros mismos (o al menos, de la imagen que el sistema ha construido de nosotros), hasta el punto de llegar a confundir ese perfil curado con nuestra identidad real.
II. La teoría del estadio del espejo de Lacan es una lente interesante para problematizar esa especie de ilusión de transparencia que estructura nuestra relación con los algoritmos. En ese estadio, el infante se identifica con la imagen unificada que ve en el espejo, pero ese reconocimiento es en realidad una méconnaissance; una identificación ilusoria con una unidad imaginaria que encubre su división. El sujeto se reconoce en una imagen idealizada de sí mismo, sin advertir que esa imagen es, en el fondo, una ficción.
Pienso que este mecanismo de falso reconocimiento hoy se extiende más allá de la infancia y resurge en otros dispositivos de autoidentificación. En el entorno digital contemporáneo, los algoritmos de recomendación funcionan como un nuevo espejo, puesto que nos devuelven una imagen de nuestras preferencias y hábitos que percibimos como fiel, cuando en realidad ha sido construida a partir de cálculos opacos, supuestos estadísticos e incluso criterios comerciales. Esta forma de méconnaissance describiría la ilusión bajo la cual interpretamos esas sugerencias como un reflejo neutral de nuestra subjetividad, sin reconocer el proceso activo de selección y filtrado que las produce.
El sujeto digital experimenta así una mezcla de reconocimiento y desconocimiento. Se identifica con el contenido sugerido sin advertir que esa afinidad ha sido modelada y anticipada. La playlist que parece expresar nuestro gusto musical, el feed de noticias que creemos imparcial, el perfil que asumimos como propio en una red social, la serie que sentimos que «nos define» porque «es justo lo que nos gusta», o la publicidad que nos interpela con una familiaridad que hasta puede resultar alarmante, son ejemplos de una imagen espejada que no revela, sino vela, las operaciones técnicas que la sostienen. Al identificarnos con nuestros perfiles algorítmicos, caemos en una forma de méconnaissance algorítmica, es decir, creemos afirmarnos a través de ese reflejo sin darnos cuenta de que se trata de una construcción parcial y muchas veces distorsionada.
III. La promesa de la personalización se presenta como un triunfo de la conveniencia (el sistema nos conoce y nos facilita aquello que deseamos), pero encierra una dimensión ideológica. Ayuda a sostener la creencia de que el usuario es soberano en sus decisiones digitales, cuando en realidad esa autonomía está profundamente condicionada. El algoritmo orienta las elecciones mientras el sujeto cree estar eligiendo libremente. Se configura algo así como una falsa conciencia digital, donde cada quien se siente dueño de su recorrido por Internet sin percibir los hilos invisibles que organizan sus opciones.
La ideología de la personalización refuerza la idea de que cada sujeto tiene un universo único de contenidos a su medida, pero cuando ese universo excluye la diferencia y la alteridad, la subjetividad queda atrapada en un juego de espejos que sólo devuelve versiones refinadas de lo ya conocido. Ante este panorama, la autonomía personal parece estar en jaque. Si esas decisiones (aparentemente libres) están moduladas por estructuras algorítmicas opacas, aunque no se perciban como imposición, aun así delimitan el campo de lo posible.
IV. Así, el algoritmo-espejo contribuye activamente a la formación imaginaria del yo contemporáneo. Nuestra subjetividad se ve moldeada por una imagen reflejada que, aunque familiar y reconfortante, es una ilusión cuidadosamente calculada. La méconnaissance algorítmica definiría la actitud dominante frente a estos sistemas. Confiamos en la neutralidad de sus consejos y adoptamos sus selecciones como si fueran nuestras, ignorando la intervención estructural que determina esas elecciones. Este desconocimiento consentido permite que los algoritmos orienten la atención colectiva y modulen progresivamente nuestras preferencias, afectando mucho más que lo que consumimos; también cómo pensamos y cómo nos percibimos.
Comprender esta lógica sería el primer paso para recuperar (al menos parcialmente) nuestra autonomía como sujetos digitales, cierta soberanía cognitiva ante dispositivos que operan por anticipación. La propuesta quizás no sea «resistir» la méconnaissance algorítmica como si fuera un error corregible (en Lacan, toda identificación supone necesariamente una forma de desconocimiento). Pero quizás sí es posible sostener una relación menos ingenua con el reflejo. Cuestionar la aparente naturalidad con que ciertos contenidos llegan a nosotros, abrirse a lo no previsto, a lo que no encaja, explorar sin que la elección esté anticipada. Todo eso puede atenuar el poder normativo del algoritmo y devolvernos, si no un yo verdadero, al menos una práctica más consciente frente a sus espejos. No necesariamente abolir la mediación, sino, en todo caso, desmarcarse de su imperativo de coincidencia.
— E.
2025-12-04 18:35:00
A nice thing we have in Sweden is dagens lunch (today’s lunch).
It’s basically a good weekday deal most restaurants offer. You pick from a couple of dishes, usually meat, fish or vegetarian, and you get a beverage, salad buffet, bread, coffee and sometimes even dessert.
I’m at such a place right now. They have ten dishes to choose from, a handful of drinks, bread and about twenty salad options. The price is 130 Swedish kronor, roughly 13 dollars.
Usually there’s apple pie with vanilla sauce for dessert, but not today. Why? Because it’s Thursday, and Thursdays belong to pea soup and pancakes.
That’s right. It’s an old Swedish tradition. Normally I would say “don’t ask me why”, but today I actually looked it up.
Turns out it began as a practical habit before Friday fasting. People wanted a hearty meal to keep them going, and pea soup was cheap, filling and easy to cook in large batches. When the soup ran out, pancakes were made from the leftover milk, adding a small sense of celebration before the fast.
Even though the fasting tradition faded, the habit stayed. I’d write more about it, but I have a tasty Thursday ritual to look after…
