Corner Corner

Subtitle Corner

There’s something special about a “corner” as a unit of learning about something. If I were to say, hey, come to my house and talk about mammals, you’d probably be like, that sounds useless. But if I were to gently invite you into Ritam’s Animal Corner, you’d be overtaken with a powerful sense of whimsy, delight, and childlike play. There’s something special about a corner, that seldom-vaunted confluence of two walls, that makes you feel safe, warm, cozy. Happy, engaged, focused. Swaddled. Held. Trapped, even. Can’t get out. Claustrophobic, overwhelming. Sweaty, nervous, nauseous. Clawing, panicked stumbling. Darkness closing in. Seeing the light. Oh god, it’s a harsh white LED! Is this what heaven is? Harsh white LED overhead lighting? Was it worth it to love and cherish Jesus my whole life just for this to be the often-vaunted paradise promised to me by scripture? Damn your religion! Damn your texts, your holy books. Damn your false promises and false prophets. I’m going back to the corner.

I’ve organized this newsletter into four Corners, much like a normally shaped room, in which I’ll invite you to sip from an idea soup and swirl it around your mouth a bit. Hope these “takes” aren’t too “hot!” (slang)

True Bug Corner

I was just doing a bit of reading about the crazy cicada swarm that’s about to overtake the West and the South. Two broods, emerging at the same time, each on different cycles, and they’re about to be super loud. That’s cool, you know? I wonder if they’ll get along with each other. But in walking down cicada lane, I stumbled upon an interesting fact: they’re a member of the order Hemiptera, which are the only order known by entomologists as being “True Bugs.” This doesn’t include ants, flies, spiders, beetles—things that you and I might call “bugs.” The idea that there is a scientific consensus on what a “True Bug” actually is really tickled me; “bug” seems like such a colloquial term. And in thinking about what cicadas are, I was like huh—they’re just insects but not really like, easily classifiable. They’re like grasshoppers or something. They’re just random bugs, no hard shell or ant vibes, not really a buzzy fly type thing. Just bugs. Just vibing. Just chilling.

Transfer of Car Ownership Corner

It’s crazy that when you sell or give a car to someone, you give them the keys. You should give them the car. Who agree?

Brooklyn Gatekeeping Corner

Bro, seriously… please, please stop. All these tech people moved here from San Francisco, and they’re trying to do the same thing here that they did there, which is to take one of the greatest cities in the world and make it stunningly, unbelievably lame.

Please, god. Please stop doing this.

The whole thing that’s great about this city and the source of its energy and dynamism are chaotic soft edges everywhere. Tech idiots think in ways that create systems striving towards a kind of equilibrium, by necessity flattening all other sources of surprising dynamism that create an environment that inspires and engages you. The worst part are the completely fucking moronic ways in which they try to apply their startup language, their VC language, whatever—to normal everyday interactions, belying a hollow, transactional, constantly optimized mode of thought.

Watch, I can do it too: We need to develop a forcing function whose inputs are “agentic” “builders” and outputs are founder-orthogonal third spaces. It’s not that hard. It’s fucking annoying though, and ignores the thing that is actually good about life—sitting around in the soup of chaotic ambiguity, feeling comfortable and happy with people you have strong emotional ties to.

Look—the thing is, these aren’t even the real ones. The real ones in tech, or any industry, are the people with actual brains, who have a knack for putting stuff together in intelligent ways instead of bandwagoning onto whatever’s going on. They’re the ones who write the papers and they spend most of their time thinking and writing about complex academic ideas instead of theorizing about a limited yuppie urban playground social sphere. They get excited about making something work in a new, revolutionary way, not “creating tech community in NYC.” They’re in the trees, we’re on the ground. These Twitter people are just midwits, just like me, but they’re midwits with delusions of grandeur, midwits who haven’t accepted their midwitness, who have glommed onto this fucking thing as their main identity, and it’s just fucking annoying. Drives me insane.

Self Hatred Corner

Why do I care so much about these dumb guys? I know why. I’m one of them. I moved to Brooklyn 3 years before them, and now I’m gatekeeping living here, even though I am also a gentrifier, and worst of all, a software engineer. In fact, worse—a software engineer who thinks of himself as creative when all he realistically does is write a Substack and perform improv 3 times a month. And I live in Pr*sp*ct H**ghts.

It’s time to turn the lens in, scrutinize the depths of my soul, and admit the truth—I am hating not because I feel any particular allegiance to a certain way of living, I’m just scared that I’ll be mistaken for one of them and it’ll make my friends ditch me and new people I meet assume that I suck. Now that I’ve said it out loud and seen how dumb my thought process actually is, I can rest easy in the knowledge that it’ll never happen—because I’m actually fine, reasonably nice, and I mostly just want to hang out outside. You guys jealous?

Nabeel’s Corner

Nabeel Culture follows eastward expansion—kind of the opposite of manifest destiny.

1. Creativity begins in Palo Alto, where legends are born.

2. Ideas trickle to Ann Arbor, Michigan, which is tight and also where a university is.

3. Major institutions (podcast companies) and powerful corporations (MFA programs) begin to accept Nabeel’s ideas in the state of New York. That’s when the real magic begins.

4. Singularity