Reflecting on 6 Years of Trenchant Edges
998 words, reading time 5 minutes.
Welcome back to the Trenchant Edges, where we dig up weird bullshit to see what we can learn from it.
Last time we spoke I was working on an extended series about media literacy using Graham Hancock’s Ancient Apocalypse series from 2022. Naturally that took a ton more time than I expected as I dug through sources I haven’t touched in years like Aristotle’s rhetoric. Then Graham announced he was sick and getting a major surgery and I don’t really want to fuck with him around that.
This isn’t as big a deal as it might seem, I just need to go back to my original idea for a target: Ancient Aliens.
It turns out writing basically two essays for every section and having one of them agnostic to the content will actually work out really well.
That’ll be coming out fairly soon anyway, I just need to digest some ancient aliens.
Actually, no. As I was procrastinating on sending this I saw a few posts that really got me thinking about this. When I started this newsletter, I wanted to avoid charging for any of my writing on politics. I no longer feel any particular need to hold to that position.
Not like I’m even paywalling anything.
Anyway, we’re doing Tucker Carlson. Because he’s a lying sack of shit and I’m tired of people acting like he’s really coming around on any of the countless lies he’s peddled for decades. Coming around would involve some kind of accountability. A thing I’ve seen not evidence he’s tried to do even a little.
He’s just a fleeing rat looking for his next ship.
(apologies to non-nazi rats for the comparison)
On a personal note, I did also actually get to go camping for the first time in over a decade which was delightful. And I visited our old friend.
Now, onto our main topic for today.
Three days ago was our 6th anniversary.
I can’t pretend it feels great.
This has been a really helpful testbed for trying stuff out and figuring out what I want to say and how to say it. It’s been frustrating in more than a few ways.
We’ll get to that in a sec.
First, I just want a vibe check here:
I’ll explain more later, but first let’s take a moment to look at some of the bangers of the last 6 years.
Greatest Hits
While I’m not entirely thrilled by my past output, I can’t deny that a lot of it is pretty fucking good.
For some context: I’ve made 245 posts and have 78 posts in draft form. I’m not going to get another wordcount for this but it was north of 300,000 words a year ago.
I’m really glad I added this section because I was feeling down on this whole thing then I read some of the shit I wrote and… it’s a good start. one of the challenges of being an artist of any kind is your ability to evaluate the quality of your work depends on how you feel… which can go in any fucking direction.
Here are a few of my favorites over the years:
In a world where people are trapped in a funhouse mirror of their own perceptions more and more, it becomes ever more important to understand the difference between your internal bullshit and the rest of the world.
Lots of people call this problem solipsism, but that’s because they’ve never engaged with the idea for any length of time. You can and should go deeper.
The result I’ve seen has been considerably more awareness of other people’s internal state and the living limits of my own perceptions.
Probably my best work is this trilogy of remixing mystic ideas through a modern lens by synthesizing their past and some present issues. I should probably just churn out one of these every month or two.
Ecology of Minds Without Bodies
Political Economy of the Unseelie Court in Cyberspace
UFOlogists are big on future promises and without results.
I could keep going endlessly, but I’ve got a busy day ahead of me.
I think I’ll just do a full post of my top 10 posts.
In Defense Of The Overambitious Dilettante
That is, me.
I was originally going to write an extended essay about the mistakes I’ve made about this newsletter as a business but honestly I don’t think anyone but me cares about that.
The most important part is I don’t publish frequently enough and you probably already know that. Following that is I don’t make enough from this newsletter to justify the time and effort it takes to. It averages to about $200/month after expenses.
But i think it’s worth doing. I have so much I want to explore and write about.
Obviously I can’t just magically jump from “making enough that it matters on my taxes” to “stable full time income.”
So the move is simple: Find some other source of primary income that doesn’t fuck me around too much and put the work in to build. Simple, if not easy.
My reach has exceeded my grasp here, but that’s part of what I think charms me about my writing over the last few years.
The fact is I cannot be an expert in all the things I want to be. Trying is still worthwhile, but there’s simply too much to know and understand to go as deep as I want in as many places as I want.
The only solution I know of to that is collaboration.
This is where being a dilettante can be very handy: I’m very good at learning other people’s frameworks so I can speak to them in their own language and then translating between domains. I used to do this in business all the time: between marketing, engineering, and management.
How does that work? Fuck if I know.
Ultimately I like doing things this way.
Fuck specialization. I want a wider view of the world than anyone else.
I’m greedy: I want to see all the possibilities and at least beat the house on which ones could be real.
Alright, that’ll have to be enough for now.
My defense is simply that this is how I like to live and I’m willing to do whatever it takes to keep learning.
Failures and all.
I uh could use an editor though. lol.
Wrapping Up
That ended up feeling better than I expected.
I’m still going to leave substack but… I need to pay for a VPS before I can actually do it. Which will be like $100 or $200.
See y’all soon.
If you want to fuck substack out of some money and help me get off this accursed platform, kick me some cash here.
I'm not clear what you mean by collaboration, but I wonder if it's something like assigning other people to do some of the research/writing that you would do if you had the time . . . lots of different ways you could approach that, It's too late at night for me to flesh out this idea, you can do what you will with it . . .