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soulcruzer

soulcruzer

@soulcruzer.bsky.social

working notes from the textual underground

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The body has its own clocks. What interests …

The body has its own clocks. What interests me here is the mismatch between the body’s rhythm and the story the working day tells about us. The working day assumes a fairly flat human being: switch on in the morning, remain cognitively available for eight hours, then switch off at an administratively acceptable time. If...

Attentioncircadian-rhythm

The cave has Wi-Fi now

What catches me in Angie Hobbs’s talk isn’t simply the claim that Plato anticipated fake news, demagogues and the slide from democracy into tyranny. Ancient philosophers are forever being advertised as having predicted the present. Give Marcus Aurelius a smartphone and he becomes a productivity guru. Give Plato an algorithm and suddenly the cave is...

Artificial Intelligencedemocracy

Culture is the expression of states of mind …

Culture is the expression of states of mind rooted in the effects of behavioural conditioning. Which means culture isn’t merely what a group believes. It’s what repeated behaviour has taught the group to feel. The child learns when to speak and when to shut up. The employee learns which questions are welcome. The soldier learns...

behavioural conditioningculture

The Monster in the Mirror

The mirror is a monster for a lot of people. I know this because I have stood in front of it and felt the room change. Not every time. Not dramatically. No gothic apparition rising out of the glass. Sometimes it's much quieter than that. You're brushing your teeth, washing your face, catching yourself in...

Time Is on Your Side: Listening to Coldplay’s Amsterdam

Time Is on Your Side: Listening to Coldplay's Amsterdam Coldplay's Amsterdam begins with a star going out. A man is swerving, losing his grip, blaming himself for moving too soon and then insisting that he waited as long as he could. He can't get the timing right. That feels true to the way despair works....

ColdplayFreedom

Time is a nonrenewable resource, but that language …

Time is a nonrenewable resource, but that language can make a life sound like a battery slowly running down. Use it wisely. Don’t waste a drop. Extract maximum value before the whole operation shuts down. There’s truth in the warning, but also a trap. The moment we call time a resource, the manager in the...

Attentionself-knowledge

The Golden Apple Has Entered the Server Room

A discord transmission from the point where magic, media language, pattern recognition and the Guerrilla Blogger interfere with one another.

Erisguerrilla blogging

What if? Two small words with a hinge …

What if? Two small words with a hinge between them. Most questions ask us to account for the world as it is. What happened? Why did it happen? What should I do about it? Useful questions, but they keep us inside the existing map. What if? takes a pencil to the border and wonders whether...

imaginationwhat if

When your own life has a voice I …

When your own life has a voice I haven’t watched My Brilliant Career yet, so I can’t say much about Sybylla Melvyn herself. But Srila Devi’s reflection on the character left me sitting with one question: What makes a person dare to live so freely? Srila writes that other people often describe her as courageous...

authenticitycourage

Take back the web. Make it weird again

Bob Sassone’s website is thirty years old. Thirty years. Older than Google. Older than the word blog. Still there, still being tended, still refusing to accept the repeated announcement that blogs are dead. Congratulations, Bob. Thirty years of keeping a patch of the web alive is no small thing. His anniversary post reads like a...

bloggingIndieWeb

Working Notes from the Textual Underground: Weekly Notes #001

24–29 August 2026 Editor’s note I had coffee with Dave, on Friday, in a small-town café in the middle of nowhere. During the conversation, something came to light that I already knew but hadn’t had a chance to follow up on yet. Subscribers to Soulcruzer receive an email whenever I publish something in the main...

reality tunnelstextual underground

On the drive down to Bristol this morning, …

On the drive down to Bristol this morning, I was listening to a 90's mix. Two tunes caught my attention, One Headlight by The Wallflowers and Public Enemy's He Got Game featuring Stephen Stills. I'll deal with He Got Game in another post. Here's the Wallflower line that poked me in the eye: “Man, I...

ChangeField Notes