01. Happy new year. I’m starting a newsletter.
Hi, I miss you.
For years I haven’t kept in touch with anybody as well as I would like to. I’ve started this twice-moonthly newsletter mailing list with everybody I wish I kept in better touch with. If I can’t manage to talk to you one-on-one, at least I can share bits of myself with all of you at once.
Today’s newsletter contains a general life update about me, followed by a description of the newsletter idea itself. I mean for these emails to evolve from this personal message into a public venue for me to share writing and creative projects. I know that everybody has their own threshold for what kinds of contact they want to receive as email, so I will not be wounded if you unsubscribe anytime.
I’m sending you this now because I’m grateful that you’re in the world, and because you’re one ninety or so people who I wouldn't think twice about sending a “how's it going?” email.
How's it going? I hope this letter finds you thriving.
Catching up with Orion
First, let me tell you what I’ve been up to. Welcome to the Midwestern Holiday Newsletter portion of the email.
The basics
I have been living in Los Angeles (Tongva land) for two years now, after four years (2018-2021) in Seattle. I had moved to Seattle for a job in 2018 after finishing a master’s degree in computational linguistics at Brandeis, for which I left San Francisco in 2015. I’m living with my partner of eight years, Samia, and we had a little courthouse elopement-wedding this May, so she is now my spouse of seven months. We’ll have a nice public wedding celebration sometime soonish, I’ll let you know.
Because I had been working remotely, I haven't had an office to go to, and therefore I haven't had local colleagues, and therefore my day-to-day social world in this new city for the past two years has been fairly small. I have a few wonderful friends in my neighborhood (West Hollywood), and very dear and important people/accomplices a two-hour drive away in the Mojave desert. I also have some old friends in LA who I still haven't gotten around to seeing — as I said, ”not keeping in touch with people the way I would like to.”
We live very near a 160-acre canyon park which has some nice hikes that our dog Penny really enjoys. 
Always becoming
If you have known me for more than five years but maybe have not talked much with me in that time, a few other general updates: after being inordinately Interested In The Idea of gender outside the binary for a number of years, I tried it on for myself and found that it fit very nicely. So I’ve been out as nonbinary since 2018 and going by they/them pronouns. If I had known I was allowed to quit the gender binary when I was younger, I bet I would done it then. If you’ve known me since I was a kid, that might make sense to you (Or maybe not! I have lived many lives in these 45 years). Part of it is rethinking the ways that my gendered socialization taught me I was expected to show up in the world: how these expectations made some things easier than maybe they should be, under threat of violent consequences for failing to meet other expectations. The other part is, to quote Alok Vaid-Menon on one of my favorite podcasts,
that we are far more tremendous, expansive, celestial than could ever be contained by a body
Also, I started spending more time in Spanish-speaking contexts when I was living in Seattle, and it felt really good when people pronounced my name with Spanish phonology, roughly /orr-YOWN/ (rhymes with “gory bone”). Since some people know me by that pronunciation now, sometimes I spell my name Orión to reinforce it, but the regular Anglo pronunciation is still fine. One thing that I appreciate about this alternative pronunciation is that it doesn’t sound like the “Ryan” or “Brian” that people often mishear when first learning my name. Anglo Orion feels neutral, Orión gives me a warm feeling, but /OR-ee-awn/ (rhyming with “snore-yawn”) can make me grimace a little and slightly regret opening this whole can of orthoepic worms.
Current status as my wildest dreams
The software engineering job that moved me to Seattle became permanently remote by the end of 2020, so I was able to continue working for them from LA throughout 2022. I was part of a layoff at the end of March 2023. My spouse Samia is a member of the IATSE Animation Guild, and her work slowed down during the WGA & SAG strikes, so we came to call our summer-to-fall period an “unemploymoon.” It was like a sneak preview of a happy retirement: spending time together just focusing on life stuff without work stress (and also taking plenty of solo excursions).
The past nine months has been my longest-ever period of unemployment, and it has been incredibly transformative and re-humanizing. Here is a partial list of things I have been able to spend time on:
- recovering from deep job burnout; befriending and loving myself
- improving my relationships with those dear to me
- getting better at recognizing stress, by getting really used to being un-stressed
- an ancestral-connection road trip through the southwestern US (Chaco Canyon, Española, Chimayó, Santa Fe, Taos, Colorado Springs, Denver/Boulder, Grand Junction)
- Catching up with beloved colleagues at the 24th Dictionary Society of North America Conference, in Boulder, and listening to some really energizing talks by indigenous language-documenters on the conference’s theme of relational lexicography. The related issue of Dictionaries journal is open-access and it just arrived in my mail.
- Worldbuilding for a story about mortal vampires and biopossibilities
- getting involved with a dreamy conceptual art-tech-philosophy collective, scheming about how we might build companion robots that help us connect better with ourselves and our people and everything else. Also being a regular panelist on their/our monthly radio show “Thinky Feely Tank” on LA Chinatown’s KCHUNG 1630AM.
- learning electronics with Arduino to build some small tech-art projects, and to start dreaming of bigger ones
- pickling and other cottagecore food-preservation techniques
- shooting and editing some micro-documentaries for Holistic Resistance
- learning to solve a Rubik’s cube [CFOP]
- taking up crochet, making myself some summer knits
- getting pretty decent at solving the Guardian’s Quiptic cryptic crosswords
- reading a lot (inclusive of audiobooks)
- riding my bike around Hollywood, and also discovering that LA’s transit system can be pretty great.
- Sitting in the audience for the taping of two Jeopardy! episodes:
Recovering from burnout has been my proudest, and hopefully most consequential, achievement in this period. I had taken some long-but-shorter-than-this breaks from my job in 2021. These were restorative and eased some anxiety, but I still felt mostly grim obligation around my work, and I knew I wanted a change before the layoff hit. And then I got that change.
I took the opportunity (with a decent severance) to re-engage with all the other kinds of creativity that I hadn't had time or mental space for. My previously-sporadic morning pages practice became more regular, and I didn't need to set aside time for the weekly “artist dates” part of The Artist's Way because I was already doing stuff to ‘nurture my creative consciousness’ every day. After about four months of unemployment, I even started having spontaneous desire to make things on the computer again. Since then I have learned a couple of new programming frameworks, stayed up late coding for fun for the first time since college, and just generally had creative fun on the computer in a way that I thought might be lost to me.
I do need to make some money, though
You have probably heard how the tech job market is: 261,847 people were laid off from tech jobs in 2023. I have been applying and interviewing but we haven't found the right mutual match yet. I am sure that everything will work out eventually, and the end of a year seems to be a particularly slow time for job-seeking. This week I'm already getting some bites from applications I sent out in December.
Staying centered
Work had been an emotional roller-coaster from 2020 onward, and then I reached this period of calm. After my first few interview experiences I initially found myself back on the roller-coaster almost as if nothing had changed: one moment, This company moved me to the next round! I am worthy, then hours later, This company doesn't see it as a fit. I'll never work again. But with every day starting from a grounded baseline, I am now able to notice such feelings without actually believing them. Separating my self-worth from my job! What a concept.
Tools for degrowth?
As I continue to search, I'm also very open to looking beyond the largely VC-funded tech startup scene where I've spent about half of my career. I have always wanted my work to doing more good than harm, but there are just so many ways to perpetuate harm. I want to help make the world more just, equitable, and sustainable for everyone — Just Transition kind of stuff. With green capitalism and techno-solutionism ascendant, many things can sound like solutions but they really depend on the continuing existence of the problem. This is true both in profit-seeking and non-profit organizations. It would be great to find work at a place where the software isn't the whole point, but one of a set of components to support something more meaningful, in coalition with people working for self-determination and radical transformation.
And I keep reminding myself that startups aren't the only way to do useful and remunerative things on the computer. I could join a worker-owned cooperative doing the kind of work I want to do. Or assemble a roster of social-justice clients who need a tech generalist on retainer. Or maybe there’s a useful subscription-based software service that I can build and that people will want to pay for, and I can work on it at my own pace: this newsletter platform is one example of somebody successfully doing that.
But I do really love working on a team. People working together can create things on a scale that no individual can attain on their own.
At this point I have learned the lesson more than once: do what you love and you will never stop working, you'll have horrible work-life balance, and you won't even get to enjoy your fun hobby anymore. For the time being, after applying to a few jobs a day, I am choosing to live a creative, reflective, diffractive life, which I intend to continue irrespective of how I earn a living.
So, this newsletter
Yes, , I said twice-moonthly
This is how the moon appeared to Earth viewers when this email went out:
I scheduled this email to send at the moment the moon reaches its Third Quarter phase, and I plan to send an email to this list every First and Third Quarter of the moon. So, half-moonthly.
This newsletter combines several different new year’s-ish resolutions and things-I-wish-I-did-more into a single project:
I want to keep in better touch with people I care about.
I want to share my work with people more consistently.
Crucially, I also want to re-engage my capacity for critical thinking, by writing out fully-articulated thoughts. Jenny Odell’s books How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy and Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture are among the inspirations that have been urging me in this direction for a few years. Then the other day I happened upon Gretchen Rubin's challenge to Write 24 for ’24, and the headline alone was the nudge I needed to finally try doing all of these things with this newsletter.
Why email?
Five years in a Slack-centric workplace led to me really neglecting my personal email. But even before that, it has been decades since I kept in meaningful touch with people via email. I miss the kind of long/deep thinking that I used to put into emails.
I do have a place where I can blog, but that requires people to go to my blog in order to read stuff. This way I can deliver my stuff directly to you.
Sharing oneself with the world is what social media used to be for. In Twitter's golden age, people there reshaped how I understand and engage with the world, and gave me a long reading list of alternative visions of societies we could live in. I don’t need to tell you how it all ended up: doomscrolling, posting for clout, brigading, astroturfing; having our leisure activities surveilled for sale as the raw material for mass societal manipulation and disinformation.
It probably took less than a year for me to become conditioned to hopscotching along a series of ephemeral reactions to bite-sized attention-bait, but it is taking me several years to recover. Past a certain point, all scrolling is doomscrolling. I deleted my Twitter and Facebook accounts in 2020, and my inner life improved so, so much. I reclaimed time, balance, attention span, and intentionality about my information diet.
Eventually, though, I missed the critical perspectives and dank memes that I used to get from Twitter. I already subscribed to several email newsletters from Cool Internet People. But I had never much read them, compelled as I was to spend any free time scrolling posts. With the time-sink apps gone, these email newsletters emerged as a sustainable, non-draining alternative: fun stuff to read, important things I want to be aware of — and when they're done, they're done and I can move on to other things that enrich my life.
So, since email is where I now like to read this kind of thing, it's the way that I'm offering it to you. But part of the deal with newsletters these days is that you can also view any of the emails online.
Why now?
For one thing: facing my mortality, basically. This is a heavy thing to lay on you right here, but my dad died of a sudden heart attack in August 2022. That loss shed light on a lot of unresolved life material for me, while foreclosing the option of resolving it with a key person involved. It showed me that if you don’t do something you've been meaning to do, it never happens. There is so much stuff I’ve “been meaning to do,” and now is the only time there is.
The other major trigger is my reaction to ChatGPT and large generative language models (LLMs) and text-to-image generators. (I am crankily resistant to calling them "AI"). What drew me to lexicography and computational linguistics was a philosophical curiosity about how people create meaning together, with words as the tip of the iceberg of a deeper interpersonal attunement (or of misalignment). My philosophical sticking point with LLMs is that they only work with those surface phenomena, with no foundation in the deep well of embodied experience and desire that motivates human communication.
Not so fast
When I started grad school, my long-term aim was to build dictionary tools that integrated with the places where people do their writing. A companionate dictionary that helped people write the most effective expression of the thing they were trying to communicate, choosing every word with care. The profitable commercial version of such a tool is, inevitably, one that promises to get it written faster: Give us the general idea in a few words, and we'll give you as many paragraphs as you want.
Saving people time at their jobs can't be so bad, can it? But automation ultimately benefits bosses far more than workers, undermines labor movements and drives income inequality:
As [Acemoglu] puts it, automation “is different than garden-variety skill-biased technological change,” because it can replace jobs without adding much productivity to the economy.
There are plenty of other problems with "AI" in the current hype cycle, but the one relevant to my linguistic career is that it doesn't appear to lead to new knowledge about the questions I'm interested in. I enjoy the work of disassembling or reverse-engineering the functioning of a mysterious system, but I cannot find that sort of curiosity about LLMs (though this Anthropic paper was quite interesting).
Unfair use
I'm concerned about LLMs’ exploitation of existing human creative work to generate fine-grained collages of creations that people have made before. Lately there are people who like to say that all human creativity is just a remix of stuff that people have already made, that all stories are just retellings of other stories — that we're no different than these conceptual meat grinders. I insist that we are magnificently more than that.
I'm also incredibly bored by the text and images that are generated by these systems: so smooth that my attention glides over it, looking for the meaningful part and finding only slippery, well-formed filler. This Is Your Brain On a Non-Stick Pan.
Thinking for myself
I don't want to outsource my critical thinking to a system designed to emit the most probable sequence of words based on text it has already seen. The present conjuncture shows me how much I already had been relegating my critical thinking to a passive, entertainment-like activity, rather than letting it lead to any perceptible action on my part. I think about a lot of stuff. Now I'm writing them down to make sure I think them through.
What kind of stuff?
There are things I want to bring into the world that only I can bring into the world. I am a really interesting person with too many big ideas to ever complete them all. But I can make solid progress on some of them, if I commit to it.
For example, I’ve taken some photographs in the last few years that looked even better in print than they appeared through my viewfinder. I have stories I want to tell in worlds that I have dreamed up. I have visions for the world you and I create together, inspired by great anti-oppression reads and also by my own spiritual seeking. I’m thinking about building a henge and other kinds of tangible apparatus to contextualize our place in the infinite universe, and to share that kind of work as it progresses. I also do some really interesting cooking that I want to brag about. At this moment I have a focaccia in the oven. And look at this nice tahdig I achieved:
Why half-moonthly?
That’s frequent enough that it can't sneak off my to-do list, but a long enough interval that I'm not setting myself up for early failure. A self-imposed deadline is a commitment to thwart my limiting belief that I am allowed to say something only if it is a) unassailably interesting, b) incontrovertibly argued, and c) not cringe. When I hit ‘send,’ I will not aim to be perfect, interesting, correct, or cool. I will aim just to have something to send.
Unattributed Internet wisdom:
Do not destroy the part of you that is cringe; destroy the part that cringes.
But why the quarter moons?
I have other things I do on New and Full moons, and I don't want to overcommit myself. That is to say, there are parts of my life that I organize by lunar cycles, and now this newsletter is another one, but I want it to be complementary to the full/new moon events, not bound up with them.
...so why is a half moon called a quarter moon?
First of all, remember that the moon is not a circle, it is a sphere. So when we observe half of the circle being illuminated in the sky, we are seeing only a quarter of the whole sphere. After all, Half of the moon is always illuminated, but sometimes we can’t see any of it. This article includes a nice illustration to convey the intuition that the quarter moon is the time when the moon is one (or three) quarter(s) of the way through its orbit around the earth (starting from New Moon on the right side):
Anyway, enough about me, how have you been? Thank you for being in the world.
That's all for now. Next message coming on the 17th at 7:52pm Pacific.
Love & abundance,
Orión
<-- I wanted to put the date at the top, but I think it's going to come through in GMT rather than PST, so I'm putting it here to double-check before I maybe put a date next time.