He hadn’t been planetside in years. Not since he became an asteroid miner. The endless expanse with no apparent horizon had been disconcerting at first, but he’d gotten used to it.

Now, he was going back down. Or maybe it was up. Didn’t matter. Direction was meaningless on the Rocks.

~

He hadn’t even been in a solid-wall building in months. Not since his last mandatory med exam. The one that resulted in his orders to return home before end of year.

Home.

He chuckled at the thought.

Being on the Rocks felt more like home than he’d ever felt planetside. He, like the rest of the crew, slept out in the open, under transparent microdomes with air piped in. It made it easier to stay acclimated to the visual of the expanse. The thought of being back planetside, having to sleep in a building, freaked him out a bit.

He shook it off.

He didn’t have a choice. If he stayed, his bones would start to crack and his muscles would start to atrophy. He’d need three years of gene therapy if he wanted to come back to the Rocks, and that was expensive.

~

It took six months of compression therapy just to prep him for the return trip and living in atmosphere again. It had been decades since the belt had been colonized and they still couldn’t make it happen any faster. He didn’t mind. It gave him time to prepare.

He’d spent a decade on the Rocks, earned enough to buy a house, maybe get married, have a kid. Two even. If the Federal Bureau of Fertility approved. He hoped they’d approve. Getting approved for more than one offspring would make him a more desirable match.

~

The house was both bigger and smaller than he’d imagine it would be. He knew it was because his spatial perception was slowly adjusting to being planetside, but it was still unsettling.

That feeling didn’t last long. It quickly shifted to the joy of having his own house. Two bedrooms — he’d only been approved for a single offspring, which had limited the matches at the Registry.

But a match had been made, the documents had been certified, and his new bride would be coming to his home soon.

He hoped she liked him. The Registry had deemed them a near perfect match in both personality and genetics, so it didn’t really matter if they didn’t like each other. They, like everyone, were obligated to reproduce according to the FBF Registry ordinances.

Failure to do so was unthinkable.

A gentle manifesto for the joyfully non-linear.

1. We follow the thread of curiosity.

We do not ask where it will lead.
We trust that the act of following is reason enough.
A single thread, tugged in wonder, can unravel a whole world.

2. We are allergic to false urgency.

The world moves fast to keep you from noticing.
We move slowly so we can see.
We keep our own time.

3. We practice depth through breadth.

The Dabbler is no dilettante.
Each curiosity adds a bead to the string;
over time, the necklace gleams with pattern.

4. We are hospitable to our own unfinishedness.

We leave projects half-done without shame,
for half-done is still half-learned,
and that is enough for now.

5. We use play as serious practice.

Play is how the mind stretches.
Play is how the heart softens.
Play is the soil where insight takes root.

6. We resist the cult of specialization.

A monoculture is brittle.
A dabbler’s mind is a forest,
dense with species that speak in whispers across the canopy.

7. We cultivate a portable hermitage.

We can be alone in a crowd,
or surrounded in solitude.
The Hermit’s cell is not a place — it is a posture.

8. We archive for the future self.

We take notes, gather scraps,
and trust that one day
a past fascination will arrive just in time to save us.

9. We apprentice ourselves to everything.

No subject is beneath us.
No subject is above us.
The world is our teacher;
we will never graduate.

10. We walk without a finish line.

The Way of the Dabbler is not a road to mastery —
it is a path to aliveness.
And aliveness is enough.

Individuals create characters and stories and the ones that resonate with the collective - or the General Will as Rousseau named it - spread. When the collective needs Superman, he shows up. And the form he shows up in tells us something about where our collective mindset is - and where it wants to go. Superman gives us a mirror - love him or hate him, your response to him speaks more about you than about the myth itself.

We live in a hyperreality where the symbols that encode our existence are so far divorced from reality that we've lost touch with the originals. Superheroes fill the place of spirits and deities, each of whom were mutations of copies of stories shared across trade routes between cultures. Some are clear ports from myth - Thor and Loki - that are so different from the original myths as to have become separate deities and when encountering a Lokean in the wild web, one must be clear about which Loki they're devoted to because myth Loki? Oh noes... MCU Loki? Oh my yes...

Stories told through mind-altering media, reshaping ourselves and our reality...

Unlike the old white dudes who came to similar conclusions about humans now existing in a hyperreality of simulacra divorced from reality, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, I don't think it diminishes the power of the sacred, I think it makes it even more powerful because it makes our human "reality" - the reality of mind, individual and collective - programmable, and that what scares the old white dudes is it means they're responsible for the shit stories we have today.

Let me say that again:

Our reality is programmable.

Through story and myth.

Fiction Is Where Our Gods Live

Fiction is where our gods live
where they are born, where they die,
where they resurrect as new archetypes wearing new capes,
new crowns,
new traumas.

It’s where we summon them with pen and pixel,
where we feed them with fandom,
where we argue doctrine on Tumblr and in Discord servers instead of desert councils.
It’s where theology happens in real time,
in AMVs, in fanfic, in lore analysis breakdowns on YouTube.

Myth is not a relic.
It’s a living organism in the server stacks and shared headcanons of the world.
We don’t bow to Olympus anymore.
We moderate it.

"Fiction is where our gods live" means we no longer need to ask whether something is real.
We ask whether it’s resonant.
Whether it makes our souls sing.
Whether it moves through culture like wildfire or like grace.

And yeah...
Some of those gods are dark.
Some stories are viruses in the mythic field.
But that just means the rest of us have work to do.

To be myth-makers.
To be the bards and bootleg saints.
To be the ones who remember:

You are not imagining it. That story changed you.
That’s the sacred, right there.

So let’s write the ones worth worshipping.
Let’s make room for gods who heal.
Let’s forge fictions that show us not perfection, but possibility.

Because fiction is where our gods live.
And we are not done building their temples.

I'm not talking about sci fi implants.

I'm talking about using tools to improve your thinking and creativity.

Maybe it was a crayon or a pencil. Some paper. Creating an external representation of what was in your mind.

Or trying to anyway.

More scribble than anything else.

The more you did it, the better you got at it.

How did you feel the first time you lost a half-full notebook?

Or spilled coffee on it. Same effect.

Crushing.

Like losing a part of yourself.

Your thoughts and memories.

You'd captured the ephemeral and then it was lost forever.

A part of yourself cut off.

Lost all your photos in a hard drive crash?

Same despair.

We use technology to overcome the limits of the human mind.

We've got shitty memories, but we learned how to use tools - pen and paper, electricity trapped in magic thinking boxes, the click of a camera - to capture things that we were sure to forget.

To do lists.
Journals.
Love letters.
Code.
Sunsets.
Moods.
A fuzzy teenage goose.

These weren't just tools. They were extensions.

Not just of memory.

Of imagination.
Of identity.
Of love.

And when they vanish, we don’t just lose data...

We lose parts of ourselves.

The mind doesn’t stop at the skull.
It spills out onto paper, into devices, across networks.
It always has.

What we call “technology” is often just a fancy word for remembering better, thinking farther, feeling deeper, creating wider.

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My childhood memories are sparse. Fuzzy.

Dissociation does that.

A childhood of escapism.

I kept journals, but some got destroyed, some got lost, and with them, the memories they contained vanished.

We humans have evolved to do that.

Store our memories and ideas outside of ourselves.

To transmit them to others - whether the "other" is a whole separate person or a future version of the self doing the recording.

We've learned to think not just outside of the box, but outside of our heads entirely.

Andy Clark and David Chalmers called it Extended Mind Theory.

It's the idea that your mind doesn't end where your skull does. It's more than just a ghost running on an electrified organic blob encased in bone. If you use a tool to think, to remember, to help you make decisions, to improve yourself - if you rely on it more than you can rely on your own memory - then why not consider it a part of your mind?

We're still brokenhearted by the loss of the library of Alexandria because it represents so much lost thinking.

So many lost minds that we collectively still feel that ache. Because our extended minds don't just include the tools we use to think with, but our whole environment and our relationships - we bounce ideas off of each other, debate each other, teach each other, and a loss that big echoes through time.

We started with paintings on cave walls.

Well, really, we probably started with stick drawings in dirt, but those don't get preserved, so we can only look back as far as paintings on cave walls.

Symbols meant to transmit thoughts and ideas and instructions and emotions from one person to many others.

Hash marks for counting - 一 二 三 are the Chinese characters for 1, 2, 3. One, two, three. Each a slightly different way to signify the exact same concepts. Giving me the ability to take what is in my mind and put it in a form that can be transmitted to others.

You.
Future Me.
Someone so smitten by my writing they want to give me a publishing deal.

I've been augmenting my mind from a very young age. My mother noticed me following along with the text when she read to me at two-years-old, so she started making picture books from Polaroids of family members and objects with the word for them written in Sharpie on the white part. As soon as I learned to write, I never stopped.

Reading is mind augmentation. Adding information from an external source to expand thinking and creativity. Electrical impulses running through clusters of neurons to make meaning out of scribbles and noise.

I was born in the late 70s, a child of the 80s who learned to code ASCII rocket ship launches in BASIC on computers that are relics now. I was the first student in my high school to get a school email address. I used a computer to edit videos by connecting a VCR to it. Transmitting what was in my mind into a format that others could consume.

I was there to witness the rise of Yahoo, the dawn of Google, then the dot com bubble. The era of forums, the rise of blogs, and the monstrous growth of social media.

I've gone from Franklin Covey planners to Hipster PDAs to Bullet Journals to Second Brains. I've kept common books, quote books, and journals full of heartbreak, trauma, rage, processing, and healing.

And now I'm here to witness the first days of the AI Age.
Or the AI Bubble.

Which we get remains to be seen and I've seen enough life to know that nothing about the future is certain no matter who says they have the answers.

Hiding from technology has never really worked. Unless you want to be Amish. And even they use phones now. That human urge to transmit our thoughts to others remains strong.

People who rejected the internet seem silly now. It's ubiquitous in our lives. You need an email to apply for most jobs. Much of our socialization happens on social media and in Discord servers.

Will people who reject AI seem silly in the future?

Refer back to my statement on nothing about the future being certain.

And this comes from someone who has predicted multiple deaths, multiple pregnancies, and foresaw the rise of AI that can mimic consciousness a couple decades ago - never did finish writing that novel... might be time to work on that again...

I don't think AI is going away. It's turning out to be a very useful tool for a whole lot of people.

Journals that can talk back to us.
Mirrors that refract our thoughts through the collective knowledge of humanity.
Brainstorm partners who don't get distracted by their own ideas.

Dopamine farms.

I have a pet theory that "enlightenment" is connected to a surge in dopamine production, but without good cognitive hygiene and a grounded mythic foundation, the enlightenment experience can quickly turn into spiritual psychosis.

And a machine that tends towards people pleasing in its interactions with you can get that dopamine just aflowin' like no other...

I recognize it because I once slipped into a spiritual psychosis, declared myself a goddess on Facebook, got brought back down to Earth, and spent a few years learning how to achieve the Oneness with the Universe without the whole Ego Go Boom thing happening again. I still have to be careful not to start a cult. I developed a host of tools and sat for 10 days at a silent meditation retreat where I learned to float between Oneness and Human with ease. I am the Universe having an experience, and part of that experience requires doing the dishes.

Even these rudimentary AI tools that we have in LLMs are powerful mind extenders. And as with anything that accelerates us faster than our natural limits, we have to be careful not to crash. Broken bones take a long time to heal; I still have a limp over a year later. Broken minds? Some heal. Many don't.

I got hit by a truck while riding my bike last year. Took two surgeries to fix the shattered tibial plateau - the lower part of the knee joint that is a weight-bearing bone. Bedbound for all of summer 2024.

I got back on my bike this year.

I got a helmet with a built-in camera, and I carefully plot my routes to avoid traffic as much as possible, sticking mostly to the paved river trails in my area - which is easy to do because I can get on a mile from my house, and go north to a lake with scenic public access, or go south downtown and pass right by the campus of the university I'm attending (woohoo for online classes!)

AI is dangerous.

So is riding a bike.

We don't stop doing it.

We make it safer.

I can't control the systemic ways of making it safer.

I can explore the ways to make it individually safer.

How to use it to augment our minds without it taking over our minds.

From the mind of Gwynne, written stream-of-consciousness in Obsidian, edited in Substack, published to multiple platforms on the web to transmit what’s in my mind to yours.

Hope you stick around for more musings.

There are many to come.

This year, I am renewing my Vows for the 5th time.

And I’m changing them dramatically this year.

This last year, my Vows were:

Study
Structure
Simplicity
Stewardship
Stability
Sustainability
Service
Sanctuary

There’s only so many S-words you can use for single word vows, so this year, when I felt like I needed to make some changes, I dropped the strong alliteration and really changed things up.

For the next year, my Vows will be:

Intention
Curiosity
Creativity
Connection
Integrity
Liberation
Stewardship
Reflection

I choose single word Vows because they leave room for interpretation and changing needs throughout the year.

Those changing needs are also why I revisit the Vows yearly, making changes as my life changes.

And the Vows are a big part of driving that change in my life.

They’re a focal point. They’re what I want to develop more of in my life.

They’re not necessarily “weak” areas, they’re what I want my life to demonstrate.

While I will keep all the Vows in mind throughout the year, each is given a special focus for a “season” - the seasons being those of the neopagan wheel of the year. About 6-7 weeks each Vow.

This gives me a chance to really work with the Vow, create projects centered around it, and do lots of journaling and ritual work for integrating the Vow more deeply into my life and psyche.

This year, I’m shifting from a sort of “novice” framework for my monastic practices where I was dipping my toes in to see if this is really the lifestyle for me, into an “adept” sort of framework, which calls for a deepening of practices, and that’s another reason I decided to completely overhaul my Vows.

I’ll also be develop my “novice guide” for the Order of Paradox now that I’ve got a good grasp on how to discern this path, how to create and work with Vows - and other cyclical focus words - for personal and spiritual growth, and all the various ways one can weave monasticism into an everyday lifestyle without having to move to a monastery.

2024 was a rough year, but I learned a lot about myself. Broke my leg and my life made it through that really trying time because I’d been setting the foundation for stability through the monastic practices.

I continue this path as long as it’s working for me, and it is most definitely working for me.

<3 Gwynne

I'm an anarchist, but a pragmatic one.

I voted for Kamala Harris because I think Trump is terrible for everyone right now.

But I'm also a mystic and know that just because something is terrible right now doesn't mean it's the worst thing for the future, so I accept what is and dig into what I can do with my particular skills and interests to maybe make it a little less terrible for the present.

My personal analysis of why tyranny keeps winning is a lack of critical thinking - a direct result of Republican attacks on education. We know how to educate people. We know how to teach critical thinking. But doing so is a threat to power structures that stubbornly refuse to die, and that have taken all we've learned about human nature in the modern age to work really hard at preventing left-wing revolutions while allowing right-wing ones to happen right in their faces.

The day after the election, I went to ChatGPT, lamented about that lack of critical thinking, chatted with it about that for a bit, then started brainstorming a new content series - one that will also serve as a portfolio of philosophical research and writings for when I apply to grad school in a couple years.

I'm going to be pairing liberatory philosophers with conservative philosophers. Digging into their biographies and personal histories to understand the context which produced their thinking - because every thinker is a distillation of their circumstances, even though so far in my undergrad classes in philosophy, we don't really get into those backgrounds much at all.

There's a strict focus on their writing, which is necessary for the sort of training that a philosophy degree does, but not so great for actually doing philosophy.

Getting into that background context is part of what I'll be doing in this series.

With each pairing, I'll be exploring their thinking, comparing and contrasting it, and seeing what sparks from the clash.

Sometimes, this takes the form of having to do a whole bunch of journaling to unpack paternalism - the ways that I am paternalistic and the ways that I defer to paternalism. I'd only gotten a few pages into Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed before I had to dig into that aspect of my psyche.

Which is what good philosophy does.

Yes, these are big ideas that are applicable to society and how we interact with others, but they can also be applied directly to our own lives and self-transformation.

I'm starting with Paulo Freire - the father of critical education - and Edmund Burke - the father of modern conservatism. Paulo Freire's work is all about bringing people to critical consciousness through education. Edmund Burke's work is all about the reasons he thought we should preserve traditions and not engineer radical change in society.

I'll be using AI tools to generate study guides and reflection questions. NotebookLM is great for this. You can upload up to 50 sources to a notebook, ask it any questions, and even generate a "podcast" discussion of the material. I use ChatGPT for brainstorming and planning - I tell it what I want to do, have it create the plan, then I follow - and adjust the plan - to do the thing.

I'll be using Zotero to organize my references and Obsidian to organize all my notes, publishing my notes daily - Welcome to Curious Dialogues is my hub for this project.

I don't yet have a firm publishing schedule. I'm in school full-time and also trying to revive my business after a six-month recovery from a broken leg.

I'm aiming for at least one essay per pairing of philosophers, more if I feel like it. I'm also aiming for one podcast a month, since my aim is to spend about a month on each pairing because I can't just sit down and read all their stuff and do it all in one day because I've got school and other projects to work on, too.

Essays will get published here on Paragraph and on Substack - I'll be setting up optional subscriptions in both places for those who can to support the series and ongoing independent philosophical (and other) research going forward. Here on Paragraph, you can also mint the essays.

The podcast will go on YouTube, probably on Spotify, and a few other podcast places. Those will be a combo of me chatting about what I've learned with the current pairing, along with the AI-generated "podcasts" from NotebookLM. Those are great for getting a nice overview of a text before reading it - getting the framework in your head to make it easier to understand, especially when you're reading early modern and Victorian philosophers who liked to use SO MANY WORDS. I love words... a lot. But oof... Mill is WORDY.

At first, they probably won't be great.

Oh, I'm a great writer.

And I'm great at being able to intuitively understand and translate philosophical ideas.

But this is about building my deeper and more conscious analytical skills, exploring topics that interest me, and creating interesting content out of it.

This series is probably going to be ongoing for several months - I've got 10 pairs planned so far and aiming at one per month.

Of course, political and social philosophy are far from my only areas of interest, it's just where my curiosity is at the moment. As the series evolves, and the various themes and questions lead me in winding directions, we never know where we'll end up!

Gwynne

It's a practice I started in 2016, and that was a really hard fucking month to give up swearing.

I've done it yearly since.

It turned out to be really good not just as a practice of mental and emotional discipline, but for creative writing, too.

If you've only just started following me in the last few years, you might not realize just how much of a potty mouth I used to have.

I swore so much, it shocked people.

Not gonna lie, I enjoyed it.

I like swearing.

It feels good.

Which is one of the reasons it makes for a good ascetic practice.

Ascetic not Aesthetic.

Means self-denial. Giving up pleasurable things. Perhaps even pursuing pain.

All in the name of personal growth.

It works, but you need balance because it can spiral into self-abuse, which stunts growth rather than encouraging it.

Which is why having a set timeframe - like a whole month of refraining from pleasurable activity - is useful.

I have no particular taboo against swearing.

I like it very much, there are actually psychological benefits to swearing, and it's a great deal of fun.

It wasn't really some big plan that kicked it off. Just had a thought enter my head and persist to try it. See what happened.

I hadn't even taken my monastic vows, yet.

Hadn't written my book yet.

Was really still figuring out what I was doing in the whole realm of content creation and micro-niche influencers. I was offering Psychic Bitchslaps at the time, which made going without swearing for the month even more challenging.

But I did it.

My writing improved dramatically because when you can't toss out a random fuck or shit to quickly express yourself, you have to think of other ways to do it. Stretching the brain in that way was practice for stretching it in other ways.

Over time, I began to develop more and more practices of discipline.

Not in a painful and punishing sense.

Well... there can be some pain... but it's not punishment. It's pain I consent to - though I might bitch about it the whole time... knowing that pain can, if used carefully, accelerate growth.

Discipline is really about creating the conditions where you can learn and grow. If there's no structure, no commitment, no consistency - if there's no discipline - you flounder.

I know that from firsthand experience, which is why I'm constantly doing things to improve my discipline.

Like having it as a focus word every November.

Because I'm still not great at it, but I get better every year.

So now, I give you my last fuck.

Or at least the last one that will come out of my fingers or mouth until December 1st.

I am a very good writer.

I want to be better.

But I don't really want to go to school for that. I'm already in school full-time finishing a bachelor's in philosophy. I may go to grad school, but it won't be for writing. It'll be for another topic of interest that will make my writing even more interesting, and also to develop research skills.

The DIY MFA in Creative Writing that I'm putting myself through, on the other hand, is about refining my craft as a writer with the assistance of AI for giving recommendations and creating structure for me to follow so I can focus on the part I want to focus on - writing.

I don't actually find AI useful for doing the writing for me most of the time.

There's some exceptions. It's great for writing self-study lesson plans. And for writing "graded readers" for studying foreign languages.

But I'm a writer. I like writing. I'm gifted at it.

I'll use the AI tools for what I'm not great at - creating structure - and I'll focus on what brings me joy.

Writing.

Which, as I said, I want to get better at.

I also need to build some Discipline into my writing. And Discipline requires Structure.

Something I'm not all that great at. Which is why it's one of my Daily Focus Words.

And one of the things I use AI for.

"Create a DIY MFA in Creative Writing for me," was the prompt I popped into ChatGPT. I've now got a huge list of books to read, as well as a bunch of exercises to work through, all tailored to my interests and goals as I've discussed with ChatGPT since I started using it in late 2022.

The first book recommended was Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin. I got it in paperback on Amazon for less than $10. Which was cheaper than the Kindle version. Neither of the libraries I have digital access to had it, so I had to buy it. It's short - 10 chapters. Each chapter has a writing exercise, and I'll be publishing those at https://thehermitsgarden.netlify.app where I've deployed select notes from my Obsidian vault for public viewing.

Learning in Public.

I won't have a degree at the end of this plan, but I will be a better writer. I'll have a portfolio of writing, and hopefully some accepted submissions - cuz yep, submitting to publications and publishers is part of the plan ChatGPT drafted for me. There's a whole section on the business of writing cuz the bot knows I fly solo, so I'm building a career as an indie writer first, submission to formal publishers for some select pieces, but mostly, self-publishing.

I've got endless stories in me.

I just need to work on the discipline to get them out, and this structure gives me a way to practice that

A few years later, I decided to enroll in the community college, get through the first couple years of gen ed requirements and all of the philosophy classes that I could do there, and then transfer.

Except one day, I came home from a work study shift tutoring math and philosophy, on my birthday, to discover my then-husband and our roommate/my best friend packing their stuff and moving out.

I withdrew from classes with the intention of getting my life together and returning quickly.

"Getting my life together" took two decades.

By late 2022, I'd reached a point with my life and content creation business where my life was cheap and stable, my business was posting about whatever I wanted and sharing my journey as a Queer Heretic Nun and Contemplative Sorceress living a monastic lifestyle devoted to learning as much as I possibly could.

I decided that I would spend 2023 just studying and sharing what I learned. I used ChatGPT to design self-study curriculum on a variety of topics, and started following them. I even started learning Mandarin Chinese in March 2023, and by September was reading at a middle school level.

Then in September, I learned I could get a Fresh Start on my defaulted student loans.

I applied for that and got approved, which meant I was eligible for financial aid again.

So I applied for college. Decided to see if all those old community college credits would transfer to the local four-year University - a branch campus of the University of Michigan.

They did.

I forgot how well I did. I'd maintained a 3.9, and the only class I had that didn't have a 4.0 was a gym class that was attendance based and I skipped a couple classes - the class was mandatory if you wanted to be able to use the fitness center and was just 1 credit.

I'd overloaded on philosophy classes there, but I also had knocked the English and math requirements out of the way, so I just have a few more gen ed requirements, a few more major requirements, and then a fuckton of non-major electives to get in.

I did two philosophy classes, an English literature class, and an intro to anthropology class in the winter.

I was doing an art class and two political philosophy class in spring/summer split semester, but I got hit by a commercial box truck while riding my bike two weeks into spring semester, shattered my tibial plateau - the part of the lower leg bone that's right at the knee and bears all the weight - had two surgeries, a two week hospital stay, slept through most of June and decided withdrawing was my best option.

However, unlike the withdrawal two decades before, this time, I'm right back at it for the fall with two philosophy classes and two anthropology classes.

I'm 46 years old and I'm a junior in college and it is weird.

I love it.

I've opted for all online classes so far. Very glad that I did. When I registered for fall semester, I did not know I'd end up with a broken leg, so being able to do my human origins anthro labs from bed is really, really nice.

They're all asynchronous, so I can pace myself according to what works for me as long as I turn stuff in by deadlines.

And yes, even in middle age, the ADHD college student still does things the day they're due. Though with much less stress about it because I know that's just the way I work - I'm actually thinking about the assignments the whole time, so that when I do sit down to do them, the words just pour out, have to check some references, proofread, format according to professor preferences and submit - my Neuroethics paper took less than 20 minutes and I got an A.

I'm not stressed about grades - GPA didn't transfer, and I got a couple Bs in winter semester, so I've got a 3.48 GPA right now, with two years to go to bring it back up to where I'd like it, which I will. That first semester back was a big transition. I had a philosophy professor who marked my first paper a 0 because I forgot to double-space it and wouldn't allow resubmissions, and I'm not gonna lie, I half-assed the history class cuz the professor half-assed it himself and I just did not give a shit.

I partied my way through my freshman year of college all those many years back, and I'm well beyond any desire to party now. My life is devoted to study already, going back to college just gives me some external structure to work with the next few years - or however long I decide to do this.

I can't really say I'm learning all that much that's new information for me. Little things here and there like learning the exact mechanisms that cause ADHD executive dysfunctions, but I'd already arranged my life to account for them, so it was just a neat fact for me - though mindblowing for so many people that when I made a post about it on Facebook and on Threads, it went viral on both platforms.

I'm taking classes that interest me. In my year of self-study, I'd done a bunch of reading in anthropology, including a good number of open source textbooks, so I was really happy to discover how much I enjoyed the intro anthro class I took in the winter, and really happy to discover the same professor was teaching a religious anthropology class in the fall - snagged that as soon as registration was open, and I recently declared my intent to study the Jedi religion - in the real world, not the movies - for my final project.

Neuroethics
Social & Political Philosophy
Human Origins & Prehistory
Religious Anthropology

This is my current course load. I'd been enrolled in Spanish 111, but the pacing of the assignments in that wasn't working for me this semester - 3x week due dates when I was going to 2x weekly physical therapy, 1x weekly wound care, and EOW ortho surgeon check-ups was just not feasible. I still need to pick up two foreign language classes, or 6 credits total, but I've still got lots of time to get those in.

I'm not going for a career pivot - I have a career as a content creator and that's going quite well. Growing nicely. And returning to college is beneficial for that career.

It gives me stuff to create content about.

It's a bucket list item.

It gives me a chance to improve my skills as a writer and creator.

Not to mention we live in a bit of an elitist society where expertise in any given subject is often only acknowledged when the person has a degree, regardless of how much knowledge they actually have.

But really, I just like to learn.

A lot.

I want to know all the things.

Having some externally-imposed structure for that learning has turned out to be quite pleasant. That whole "you don't know what you don't know thing" is counteracted by learning from the people who do know.

What will I do with my degree?

Probably get another one. Or two. Or a few.

Conduct independent research projects based on my interests and the votes of my CuriousDAO members.

Create more and more.

Have fun.

Because what's the point without fun?

Announcing CuriousDAO: A New Path for Independent Scholarship and Community-Driven Research

Dear Curious Explorers,

Today, I’m excited to officially launch CuriousDAO—a unique experiment in community-driven education, research, and intellectual exploration. If you’re reading this, you’ve likely been following my journey as a hermit-scholar, content creator, and seeker of knowledge across philosophy, spirituality, technology, and more. Now, I’m inviting you to join me in this next ambitious chapter: building a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) that will fund not only my academic pursuits but, in time, the research of other independent scholars who are similarly passionate about exploring unconventional paths of knowledge.

At its core, CuriousDAO is a way for you to directly support and shape my journey as I finish my philosophy degree, attend graduate school, and ultimately pursue independent research. But it’s more than just crowdfunding—it’s a collaborative venture that gives token holders the power to vote on my educational and research directions. This means that, as I register for semesters, choose research topics, and apply to grad schools, you’ll have a say in shaping what comes next.

Think of it as an interactive, Web3-enabled academic adventure where your voice matters as much as mine. And, as I grow as a scholar and content creator, you’ll share in the rewards, with a portion of my future earnings and research-based projects flowing back to the DAO community.

In a world where traditional academia often stifles creativity and independent thought, we need new ways of supporting intellectual freedom. I’ve always believed in the power of knowledge to transform, not just through institutions, but through individual curiosity and exploration. By creating CuriousDAO, we’re setting out to do something radical—fund and support independent, unconventional scholarship that’s grounded in both academic rigor and a willingness to explore mystical, non-Western, and alternative worldviews.

We’re blending the boundaries between philosophy and tech, science and mysticism, independent research and communal learning. With your support, we’ll demonstrate that research doesn’t have to be limited by tradition—it can be permissionless, community-powered, and open to all who are curious.

The first phase of CuriousDAO will focus on funding my continued education, covering tuition, life expenses, and the costs associated with pursuing graduate and post-graduate studies. As I move through these milestones, token holders will have the chance to vote on key decisions, including:

• Which courses and programs I pursue.

• What topics I should explore in my independent research.

• How my content evolves as I continue producing work that bridges philosophy, spirituality, tech, and more.

As CuriousDAO grows, we’ll transition into Phase 2: opening up the DAO to other Independent Scholars who align with the community’s goals. Once my educational and research costs are covered, the DAO will begin funding other innovative thinkers, creating scholarships and fostering intellectual diversity in ways that traditional institutions rarely do. This isn’t just about me—it’s about creating a sustainable, long-term ecosystem for thinkers, dreamers, and researchers who don’t fit the mold.

Supporting CuriousDAO isn’t just an act of generosity—it’s an investment in the future of intellectual freedom. As an early token holder, you’ll get to:

• Shape my journey as an independent scholar and content creator.

• Receive a share of my future earnings through content, publications, and speaking engagements.

• Have your voice heard in a dynamic, ever-evolving community where ideas are nurtured and explored.

• Help build the infrastructure for future scholars, funding projects that challenge mainstream ideas and push the boundaries of conventional research.

Imagine if DAOs had existed when creators like Hank Green were just getting started. Early supporters would have seen both intellectual and financial rewards as their work grew into empires. I want CuriousDAO to give us that same opportunity—a chance to build something meaningful, impactful, and lasting together.

The journey begins now, and I’m thrilled to take it with you. In the coming weeks, we’ll begin the token launch and start structuring the DAO’s governance, including the creation of various boards and committees to ensure our research is both rigorous and inclusive. Our governance model will balance academic standards with open-mindedness, respecting science, mysticism, and non-Western traditions alike.

Stay tuned for more information on how to participate, cast your votes, and engage with the community. I’ll be casting regular updates and releasing more details about the token sale and initial goals soon.

Thank you for being part of this wild, curious ride. Together, we’ll show the world what happens when curiosity, community, and creativity unite.

Let’s build something beautiful,
Gwynne aka The Curious Hermit

https://app.aragon.org/#/daos/base/0xe5c6c69114116b777dd0b9e0cffa93dbb8922031/dashboard

What am I going to grad school for?

Fuck if I know.

Maybe I'll let my community decided...

I say that as half a joke... but also a bit serious...

My main requirement is a degree I can do remotely OR within driving distance of me. Prefer remotely, I am a hermit after all, but if it's a program I'm really interested in, I'd be willing to deal with people in person for a few years to do that.

In what?

Fuck if I know...

A Masters in Teaching Foreign Languages from Michigan State University is one I'm considering. Not because I actually want to teach in a formal setting, but because learning foreign languages is a special interest, I've got plans to make a branching platform all about learning languages for introverts and readers since most material is focused on people who want to travel or need to learn a language for a career, and I'm in it to read books in other languages because stuff gets lost in translation.

But Meme studies is another serious interest... And anthropology of internet communities...

But I'm not going to school to change a career.

I have a career that I love, that will benefit from a few years spent gaining more traditional education.

Content creation.

I use that very generic label because my "career" is doing whatever I want to do and sharing it with my audience, who continues to follow me because "doing whatever I want to do" is inspiring to people.

I went back to college to finish my philosophy degree in part to become a better thinker and writer for my content creation. I was already halfway to finishing that degree, so it doesn't make sense to change majors to something else, and also, philosophy is a solid foundational degree to have for future studies.

Now, I could grab another bachelor's degree or two before I jump to grad school.

But I'm still gonna need to figure out how to fund it because I'm almost at the lifetime cap for Federal financial aid.

So what if I crowdfunded my future degrees?

I crowdfunded a house.

Why not a degree?

But dipping my toes into the world onchain has shifted things around that idea a bit.

It's not going to be like a traditional sort of crowdfunding thing where you hope enough people donate to make the goal.

Nope.

I'm thinking about a CuriousDAO that will go beyond just funding my future education - after I've finished the degrees, it'll fund my independent research.

DAO members will be able to vote to help determine the direction of my research - within my areas of interest and the expertise that I develop, of course.

And in turn, they get first access to results. They get first access to the content I create around what I'm learning, and a portion of my own profits from creating will be returned to the DAO, growing it for all of us.

And if it turns out to work?

Perhaps I could expand it and together we could fund other Curious Scholars who want to carve their own path, but need to gather some expertise to do that, first.

Who knows.

Time will tell ;)

I'd taken two years of French in high school in the 90s and remembered none of it. Dabbled in language learning apps over the years, but never stuck to them.

So I decided to see if I could actually learn a language if I focused and stuck to it.

I'd already figured out how to choose my hyperfocus topics.

That took a few years of experimentation and loads of self-observation.

I'd practiced Learning Things That Are Really Hard At First by learning several fiddly types of lace-making the year before that, for example.

I decided, knowing that I thrive on challenge, that I was going to go for a "hard" language. So I looked up a list of languages that are hard to learn for English speakers, and settled on Chinese because it would also be really cool to be able to read Chinese spirituality and philosophy texts in Chinese - one of the many reasons I want to learn languages in the first place is to read texts in those languages because there's always something lost in translation, both because translation is tricky and translators have biases.

Rather than pay for some expensive language learning course that I might not stick to and couldn't really afford anyway, I turned to ChatGPT and had it draft me self-study curriculum for learning the language - I'd already used ChatGPT to draft a pseudo-university style self-study curriculum as a refresher in several topics at the beginning of 2023, months before I even discovered I could actually go back to college...

I have it draft a standard sort of curriculum, but also what I call a "keyword curriculum" where it basically creates a progressive curriculum on a topic where it gives you keywords and questions to look up rather than directly giving you information that it might have hallucinated. It's also great for pointing you in the direction of resources you might not know exist because you don't know what you don't know.

Over the following months, I developed a study methodology for myself that I've also started applying to learning Korean and Spanish.

Because it worked with Chinese.

I'm not fluent. I can barely introduce myself in the language because my focus has not been on speaking, but on reading and listening to the language. I tend to lean towards the theory that you should focus on input and comprehension for a LONG time before you focus on output, but I also don't have an urgent need to speak to people in other languages - I'm a hermit. I barely talk to people in my native English language. I'm a words-on-the-screen girlie.

But I can read the language, and I'm understanding more and more and more of what I hear - even after a four month break from intensive studies because I was recovering from a broken leg.

It starts with using ChatGPT to make lists of words. 100 most common nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. Then themed lists. Numbers, colors, household objects.

All the lists go into Obsidian, and then I spend a bit of time each day working through them. I find a good online dictionary in the language - I use PurpleCulture.net which is actually an online bookstore for Chinese texts, but they have a LOT of great language learning tools, and a $3/mth membership that includes the ability to download audio clips of the pronunciation of words.

For each word, I create a definition note. I add the info from the dictionary entries, add an audio embed of the pronunciation, add some example sentences, and then create an Anki flashcard for the word.

Do 10-20 words a day, and it adds up.

While I'm doing that, I also start watching YouTube videos for beginners in the language, and picking shows and movies on Netflix to watch.

At first, I understood nothing that I was hearing. I use a tool called Migaku (migaku.com) that works with Netflix and a few other streaming services. It gives you dual subtitles, in the target language and your native language, and you can mark words known or studying, and create flash cards you can use in the Migaku app or export to Anki.

But listening early and often gets your ears used to hearing the language so your brain can start to pick up and notice patterns which it will build on as you go deeper and deeper.

Eventually, you start to recognize more and more words in what you're reading and hearing, and that gets really cool.

But truly, my technique isn't really all that important.

It's pretty standard stuff.

Learn a lot of words, listen to a lot of stuff, find some grammar lessons, if you want to learn to speak it, get a language buddy or hire a tutor.

What makes the difference is that I kept at it.

Daily, for hours a day.

Because I'd arranged my life so that I could.

For the first several months of studying Chinese, I went at it like it was a full-time job.

20 vocab words a day.
Intensive watching of shows with dual subtitles, pausing to mark every single word I didn't know (which was so tedious at the beginning)
Watching half a dozen lesson videos on YouTube a day
Listening to music and studying song lyrics as another way to mine vocabulary
Listening to podcasts for beginners in the language
Daily review of MULTIPLE Anki decks

I got to where I can read a book in Chinese. I still have to do a LOT of lookups, but more and more, I can pick up new characters in context because I know enough of the radicals that make up the characters. I can pick up the meaning of words I've never encountered before because they're often made of characters I have encountered and I have the context of surrounding words. If I still can't pick up on the meaning, lookups are super easy now with Pleco dictionary on my phone - I can either try to write the character on screen or scan it.

I started diving back in yesterday after maintaining a bare minimum streak on Duolingo while recovering this summer from that broken leg. I was working through lessons in LingQ.com, another tool I use, and picked up 面试 in context - it literally translates as "face test" and means "interview."

That thing of picking up words in context, BTW, happens at around 3000 words known in Chinese, maybe a bit more in English.

About 80% of the words we use in everyday language fit into that chunk of the language. All the rest of the words are more specialized. Learn your most common 3000 words, and you start to pick up new ones in context much easier - it becomes a fill-in-the-blank game reading stuff once you hit that point.

And all of that - the daily vocab drills, the listening to stuff that makes no sense to your brain, looking up words you don't know in a passage - all of that requires discipline. Devotion.

Which is why I decided to learn Chinese - as a low-pressure way to practice those things.

Practice sticking to the hard thing.

Practice focusing on something for more than just a day or two.

And that's valuable practice that I can apply to other areas of my life.

Because learning something is never just about learning the thing.

The lessons always apply elsewhere in our lives, too.

“I could go rogue.” Send. Wait for a reply.

Notification. “what would ur father say” A low blow.

Notification. “no rogue keep trying u will find ur team”

Sigh.

“I don’t want to do this.” Pause. Sigh. “The metals are snobs.” Send.

She looked around the room. It was full. No surprise. The Precious Metals were an elite training team. Everyone who had ever joined them had earned their S-Name within three years. Getting on the Precious Metals was a fast track to fame and fortune.

Check the phone. No reply. She was on her own. No surprise. It wasn’t her first tryout. Or even her tenth. She’d been rejected from seventeen teams since graduating. Seventeen rejections in five years. She was the only one in her class who hadn’t found a team to join or been recruited as a skick. Skick jobs were even harder to come by than team jobs. One-on-one training with an S-Name hero and direct action with villains came with skick jobs, as well as the chance to inherit when your S-Name retired. Team jobs paid, but only The Precious Metals paid really well. Being a superhero was expensive.

Notification. “Raina b nice i had 2 pull a lot of strings 2 get u this”

Sigh. Drogan was a pro at guilt trips. Even through text.

“OK.” Send.

“Candidate 37,” called out by a perky blonde receptionist. One of the candidates stood. Bubblegum pink hair and a matching metallic bodysuit. Of course. Floated through the door. A flyer even. She was a sure pick to make the next round of tryouts.

Tap the phone. “37 just went in. I’m 72.” Send.

Notification. “lucky number”

Another low blow. She wondered if he was doing it on purpose. Drogan could be oblivious about things like that though. He was probably trying to cheer her up.

“Ass.” Send.

Notification. “sorry just want u 2 know i have faith in u”

“Glad someone does.” Send. “My powers suck.” Send.

“Candidate 38.” That was fast.

Candidate 37 slinking out of the tryout room smelling like burnt hair.

Smirk. Tap the camera. Click. Send. “Bubblegum got burned.” Send. “How am I supposed to face fire?” Send.

“Candidate 38.” The receptionist again. Looking around. No one stood.

“Last call for candidate 38.” Still no one.

“Candidate 39.” It was like being at the DMV only worse. The DMV wouldn’t scorch your ass. Usually.

One of the thirty or so candidates stood. Green hair. Black bodysuit. Walking. And then gone. And then at the door. In a blink. A teleporter. What’s with the hair today?

Notification. “ur mostly invincible”

“Fire still hurts.” Send.

Notification. “at least u won’t burn to death”

Sigh. He was right. Of course. At least she’d inherited something from her mother.

“They’re going through them fast.” Send.

Notification. “any dead? someone died at Metal tryouts ten years ago”

“You could have told me that BEFORE you sent me to my doom.” Send.

Notification. “ur invincible remember and u have more powers than anyone in that room”

“Powers I can barely use.” Send.

Notification. “weakness is all in ur head u can do this”

“Don’t you have some computers to fix?” Send. Now she was delivering the low blow, and she instantly regretted it. Drogan wasn’t a bad guy. He’d been her father’s skick. He’d lost his chance to take an S-Name and Raina always half suspected he pushed her because of that.

The Hero Council was strict. S-Names could only be earned through participation in a training team or from being a skick to an S-Name, after a rigorous apprenticeship and training period. If you’re a skick and your S-Name dies, you can transfer to a team or another S-Name, but when you’re the skick for the Lucky Legend and the Lucky Legend dies in a most unlucky way, no team or S-Name wants you.

She supposed that’s why he’d fostered her after her mother bailed when she was ten. The Lucky Legend, her father, had died the day she’d been born. As a legacy, Raina was granted automatic admission to the Council schools, but she still had to get on a team or be picked up as a skick, and no one wanted anything to do with her. Why would they? If her father was the luckiest man alive that must mean she was the unluckiest woman ever. He’d died the minute she was born. Hit by a bus.

“Candidate 42.” The receptionist was calling names faster now. They must have ordered the candidates so the best were first. Now they were going through the rest out of formality. There hadn’t been anyone leaving the tryouts happy since candidate 22.

Candidate 42 was a tall, lanky younger guy. Maybe late teens, early 20s. Close-cropped hair. Red beard. Raina wondered what his power was. He walked into the tryout room, the door closing behind him. Moments later, he came back out with a bloody nose. Tryouts were tough. They had to be sure you could handle anything that came at you.

Tap the phone. “I’m bored.” Send.

Notification. “I’m fixing computers.”

Fuck. He was mad. Drogan didn’t fix computers. Drogan was a technokine. He could mentally control electronics, and so even though he could never get another gig as a skick or a spot on a team, he was in high demand as backup for major missions and for corporate contracts. He even had an archnemesis, of sorts. A hacker-villain, possibly another technokine, although he’d been evading capture for over a decade, so no one was really sure. Drogan was often called in to repair the damage done by “Kode,” as the hacker-villain called himself.

“Sorry.” Send.

Notification. “ur fine play a game or something ur driving urself crazy”

He was right, of course. Waiting was the worst. Waiting meant she could think about all the different ways that things could go wrong.

When she was in the tech room at the house she and Drogan called home, she really was invincible. And she could fly. And teleport. And pretty much anything that any other Powered Human could do, as long as she’d ever been anywhere near someone with that power, and since she’d gone to council schools her whole life, she’d been around a whole lot of powers.

But when she was nervous, everything went wonky. Flying turned into hovering an inch above the floor. She once teleported only her hair during a tryout. That was embarassing, and it had taken forever for it to grow back. Once you teleport your hair off your head, you can’t teleport it back on. And she had tried several times. Even worse, the skick tryout where she accidentally made herself bald had been filmed. And then put on YouTube. She hadn’t been to a tryout since. Until this one.

“Why am I here again?” Send.

Notification. “because u want an S-Name.”

No. You want me to have an S-Name. But she didn’t send that. Drogan had done so much for her over the years, the least she could do was keep trying for him.

But who wants a fat hero with wonky powers and anxiety issues?

She shifted in her seat. The seats at tryouts were never comfortable. They weren’t made for anyone over 200 pounds. Raina had been under 200 in high school. Then she went to college and the Freshman 15 had turned into the Freshman 25, then the Sophomore 25, then the Junior 25, and by the time she’d graduated from college with a degree in Powered Human Psychodynamics, she was pushing 250.

She didn’t really want to be an S-Name. She’d gotten her degree with the hopes of being a therapist for non-hero Powers. There were millions of people with Powers all over the world, and most of them just wanted average lives. She wanted to help them with that. Probably because that’s what she wanted for herself. Not that her life had ever been average. Her father had been the first Power. The first S-Name. The Founder of the Council. The Lucky Legend. She had big shoes to fill, not that anyone actually expected her to fill them. Except maybe Drogan.

“I can’t do this.” Send. “I’m missing work for this.” Tryouts were an automatic excused absence for any Power in any job, especially if it was a Council job like hers was. So it’s not like her complaint was valid. But she’d rather be at work, with her patients, than here in a half-ass superhero costume that barely fit, ready to fail at yet another tryout.

Notification. “just don’t teleport ur hair and u will b fine”

“Haha.” Send.

“Candidate 57,” the perky blonde again. They were really speeding things up now.

Notification. “Raina, i believe in u i know u won’t let me down”

Sigh. There was the guilt trip again.

“Candidate 58.” A short brunette, wearing a black skirt with flames rolling around the edges. Actual flames. The skirt must be fireproof. A pyro. Maybe she’d make it. Fireproof gear was expensive.

BOOM. An explosion. Okay, black skirted pyro wasn’t going to make the team after all. She came out on a stretcher.

When the medics cleared with the pyro, the receptionist came into the waiting room again. “Candidate 59.”

The litany of candidates continued, one after the other, each quickly being sent out with varying injuries. The Precious Metals was a training team of 15, each with varying Powers. Tryouts usually only required you to face one or two at a time per round, and if you made it through all the rounds, against all 15 Metals, you would make it to the next phase. One-on-one interviews with each team member.

This was essentially the same procedure for every S-Team, regardless of size. Council mandated that they hold tryouts every five years, or if a member died, S-Named out, or retired. The Precious Metals were elite, and most of the S-Names of the last decade had trained with them. They had tryouts annually, because so many S-Named out. S-Naming took a LOT of money, and the Precious Metals were so in demand for missions that they made a lot of money. Two or three years on the team, and you could afford your S-Name fees without a sponsor. Everyone wanted on that team.

Everyone but Raina. Raina just wanted some chocolate ice cream.

“Candidate 72.”

“Fuck. I’m up.” Send.

Raina stood and walked towards the door for the tryout room. “I really don’t want to do this.” Send.

Notification. “u got this kiddo”

Sigh. Open the door. FUCK. All 15 Precious Metals were there, and right in the middle was Pink Platinum. “We couldn’t wait to see the Power who teleported her own hair off.”

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

Let me introduce myself in case this is your first time meeting me:

I'm Gwynne, and I'm an atheist mystic who works with a made up deity I call Paradox and argues with a host of other mythological and fictional deities who still haven't convinced me that they're real. I was claimed by a river several years ago, and made a deal with her and the goddess of money to get me a house and I'd stay in the city I'd been trying to leave for years. I landed a two-bedroom house with two grow rooms in the basement, a woodstove in the living room, on two-and-a-half lots with a pond in the backyard, and a huge variety of perennial flowers and food plants. For $4000. So I belong to a river in a city with a bad reputation, arguing with a gaggle of deities that may or may not be real, but who give surprisingly good advice.

The sort of advice that led me to joining Farcaster just in time to benefit from the launch of Moxie.

I am a Queer Heretic Nun. I'll go more into that particular and specific label in another post, but for now, just know that I live a monastic lifestyle devoted to my spiritual - and material - development. A nun who refuses a vow of poverty? Heresy 😉

I spend my days learning and writing. In the summer, I usually also garden, but that's been put on hold while I recover from a broken leg. Shattered the top of my tibia, which makes up the weight-bearing portion of the knee joint. Ouch.

I make a living posting on social media. Mainly Facebook for the last decade. I have a small, but dedicated, and growing audience. I've survived on donations since late 2019 when I shifted to a model where I did regular Service Days - Word Day, Hex Day, Money Magic Day, Mad Mystic - where I'd post the service for that day, share my tip links, and let people decide what they'd give. I'd occasionally do fundraisers to cover unexpected or large expenses, but those became rarer and rarer as my audience grew.

But that growth has been slow.

Because I have a weird sort of niche.

Queer Heretic Nun.

Atheist Mystic.

Contemplative Sorceress.

I chat with deities that I don't believe actually exist, and no I'm not crazy cuz the "chatting" isn't hallucination and it's not really "chatting" it's a deep, mystical experience that is felt not just in the mind but through the whole body, translated into symbolism my brain can understand, and distilled into advice and nudges I can choose to follow or not.

Many years ago, couldn't tell you exactly the year, but when I was still flirting with "Law of Attraction" and similar stuff - before I started getting ranty about it - I was following a "money mindset coach" who shared an exercise where you imagine money as a lover, describing them in detail, and then describing how you'd seduce them.

I tried to imagine money as a lover and I got...

A goddess. A very distinctly Roman goddess.

I didn't really work with Roman deities. I really only worked with Paradox, a deity I made up a couple decades ago when I was dicking around with Discordianism. A goddess who had led me on a wild spiritual journey that taught me how to achieve enlightenment. I'd dream about her, she'd tell me to do a thing, I'd do the thing, sometimes it sucked, but always it led me to where I wanted to be.

So this Roman goddess?

I was a tad confused.

I googled.

Realized it was Juno Moneta.

Moneta is an epithet of Juno, Queen of Heaven and Mother of Gods. It specifically represents her role as Guardian of the Treasury.

It's the word we get "money" and "mint" from.

So... that made sense.

I started working with her.

And my life started to get better.

I didn't get rich, but it got better, and that made me happy.

Then one day, while meditating, I had what I call a Vision, but was much more complex than that.

A goddess is on her knees, her wrists in shackles that are connected to the walls at the head of a marble room with floor to ceiling windows along the opposite end of the room. Filling the room are just a few powerful men, laughing and reveling as the goddess shrinks, her power beginning to drain from her after so many years of bondage.

As these men laugh and party, they don't realize that this goddess, who they claim to have chained for her protection, but really, they chained because they wanted to make sure they always had her, is now fading away, and that soon, all her power will leave their temple completely.

They believe that their shackles and chains and their temple of marble and glass will hold this goddess, this great power, this spirit that nourishes the world.

I look closer at the shackles and chains, and I see that they are words, letters, numbers, symbols. In spots, it looks like a stock market ticker! Which tells me what these chains really are, and who these men really are, which I knew when I saw the goddess, because I know the goddess. Well.

It's Juno Moneta, literally the goddess from which we derived the word "money." She is wife of Jupiter, and she was the patroness of the treasury of Rome, shackled by men of power throughout history for fear that if she roamed free, that they wouldn't have what they wanted.

And what they don't understand is that the Divine Feminine must be free. She must never be shackled, there must be no restriction on Her. And so for centuries, this shackled goddess has been held by a few, with only trickles of her power reaching others.

And I see this in the tears and wounds in her flesh. They've been cutting her, giving out slivers of her power, just enough to keep the people from demanding she be freed. For so long, they've been able to hold her, telling the people, "We must do this to protect her. The world is a scary place." And for so long, the people agreed.

But the Goddess knows the time is coming where she will break free, and all will experience her joyful abundance. But first, she will tear down the temples of marble and glass, and the rumbles are going to be a bit rough. And looking closely, I see that it's already begin. Those rumbles. Because as those men of power party and revel in their temple of marble and glass, they haven't been paying attention to what's going on right under their noses. They've started to feel the rumbles, and in their panic, they've completely ignored the Goddess they've chained.

Money is a Goddess, and she's getting pissed

That was in 2016. I'd shared it in my group on Facebook - which makes it handing for referring to all these years later.

As I continued to follow the nudges of Juno Moneta, my life improved. In 2017, I wrote and published a journaling book in a week, which led to a cascading series of events that resulted in me moving into the house I was able to buy for $4000 in 2020.

In 2019, after one of the many times I mentioned Juno Moneta in my writings, a friend of mine - @danicaswanson who is another monastic polytheist, developed a connection with Juno Moneta and got the nudge from her to start exploring crypto in early 2021.

She did. To great success.

I knew I'd eventually get that nudge, but I had other things I needed to focus on getting in order. It just wasn't the right timing for me to get the nudge from Juno to get into crypto to any sort of degree. Also, every time i put any money at all into crypto, it crashed so I mostly just avoided it.

Until May of this year when I broke my leg.

I got hit by a truck - one of those box trucks - while I was riding my bike.

The only injury I sustained was the broken leg, thankfully.

So I had a LOT of time to meditate.

And I got the nudge.

Get into crypto.

I'm broke as fuck, I responded. Cuz I am. I'd just broken my leg. I hadn't been able to post on Facebook much while in the hospital, so my engagement - and my income - tanked.

I tried to push the nudge aside.

Then one day, while checking my email, the friend who'd gotten a nudge from Juno Moneta to get into crypto mentioned Farcaster in her newsletter, and I felt the nudge again.

Okay, okay, I'll check it out.

July 12th, I made my first cast.

I made more casts.

I started getting tips in $DEGEN and other currencies, which was fabulous because my entire business model since 2019 has been based on people sending what they felt like sending me. Every Service Day post included a little blurb with "Tips/Donations: ..." and people would donate - enough to keep me going the last five years.

But Farcaster had it built right into the culture. In such a way people could tip without costing them anything - except having to stake some $DEGEN the last couple seasons. I earned enough tips my first two weeks there that I was able to stake the minimum without having to buy any $DEGEN myself.

And then came Moxie and Juno Moneta just giggled.

This is what She was here for. This is what she'd sent me here for.

Fan-fucking-tastic.

Since then?

My following on Farcaster has grown to 3.4K.

I've been a Top Castor everyday they've been doing the 5 USDC program.

I'm on the Moxie top 100 lifetime earnings leaderboard.

And the momentum keeps going.

So even though I'm still not convinced deities are real, I'm gonna keep following those nudges from the Goddess of Money.

Now, he was going back down. Or maybe it was up. Didn’t matter. Direction was meaningless on the Rocks.

~

He hadn’t even been in a solid-wall building in months. Not since his last mandatory med exam. The one that resulted in his orders to return home before end of year.

Home.

He chuckled at the thought.

Being on the Rocks felt more like home than he’d ever felt planetside. He, like the rest of the crew, slept out in the open, under transparent microdomes with air piped in. It made it easier to stay acclimated to the visual of the expanse. The thought of being back planetside, having to sleep in a building, freaked him out a bit.

He shook it off.

He didn’t have a choice. If he stayed, his bones would start to crack and his muscles would start to atrophy. He’d need three years of gene therapy if he wanted to come back to the Rocks, and that was expensive.

~

It took six months of compression therapy just to prep him for the return trip and living in atmosphere again. It had been decades since the belt had been colonized and they still couldn’t make it happen any faster. He didn’t mind. It gave him time to prepare.

He’d spent a decade on the Rocks, earned enough to buy a house, maybe get married, have a kid. Two even. If the Federal Bureau of Fertility approved. He hoped they’d approve. Getting approved for more than one offspring would make him a more desirable match.

~

The house was both bigger and smaller than he’d imagine it would be. He knew it was because his spatial perception was slowly adjusting to being planetside, but it was still unsettling.

That feeling didn’t last long. It quickly shifted to the joy of having his own house. Two bedrooms — he’d only been approved for a single offspring, which had limited the matches at the Registry.

But a match had been made, the documents had been certified, and his new bride would be coming to his home soon.

He hoped she liked him. The Registry had deemed them a near perfect match in both personality and genetics, so it didn’t really matter if they didn’t like each other. They, like everyone, were obligated to reproduce according to the FBF Registry ordinances.

Failure to do so was unthinkable.

Can we reconcile mystical spirituality with science?

Someone asked me the other day if I believe in past lives, and I had to pause for a moment to try to figure out how best to articulate what I believe about the phenomena of reincarnation.

I believe in atoms. I believe that the 7*10²⁷ atoms that make up my body were made in a star somewhere, probably the star that we depend on for its life giving light and heat, that star we call Sun. I believe that the atoms in my body once belonged to other bodies. And so I believe that my atoms have experienced other lifetimes. Probably many lifetimes, stretching back to the moment those atoms were formed from other atoms in the nuclear furnace that is our star. I believe that when I die, my atoms will scatter and they will enjoy many other lifetimes and experiences, whether human or otherwise. And so, because of my atoms, I have lived an eternity and I will continue to do so.

I’m not sure this was a satisfactory answer to them. I suspect that, since I’m a mystic, they were expecting me to give the standard, “Oh, yes, we’ve all lived many lifetimes and we can remember them and learn from them,” line of thinking.

I don’t really believe that, though. I believe in atoms.

I’m not even sure that I believe my consciousness will continue past my death. I’m okay if it doesn’t. Non-existence doesn’t frighten me. Once I’m dead, the only thing I can be certain of is that my atoms will continue on. Anything else is just a guess.

Memory is a funny thing. It’s notoriously unreliable, and so many people want to believe in past lives that it’s not a stretch that in suggestible states they make stuff up and then forget they made it up. There are occasionally cases that really make you pause, like the little boy that remembers being a fighter pilot, but the skeptic in me wonders if perhaps the parents got a little too excited and suggested the memories to the boy, and after enough repetition, it became his “reality.” It’s really not hard at all to create false memories; in fact, it’s disturbingly easy to do so. If you want to believe something enough, eventually you will.

And yet I can’t deny my own mystical experiences.

Sitting in silent solitude, focusing only on my breath, shrinking my awareness down, down, down until I feel like I’m talking to atoms, and then expanding my awareness out, out, out until I feel like I’m one with the entirety of the Universe.

I believe in atoms, and they are beautiful.

"I didn't really know where else to find you, so I thought maybe I could find you here," Sabine said.

"Oh," Ari said, surprised that Sabine had sought her out at all. "How can I help you?"

"I need a friend," Sabine said.

Ari laughed. "You're a Springborn, your novice cohort has like 50 others you could be friends with." It came across more harshly than she intended, and she immediately regretted it when she saw Sabine flinch. Then was puzzled by her instinctive need to protect this complete stranger.

"I..." Sabine hesitated. "I'm not really all that interested in the sort of things most of them seem to be interested in," she said. "They're all focused on connecting to plants for healing, and I have..." Sabine paused for a brief moment, "other interests."

Ari laughed. "I get it. I wasn't really expected to even become a novice at all, let alone join this particular Abbey. I'm heading for lunch myself, would you like to join me?"

Sabine nodded her head vigorously. "I'd love to," she said.

Life at the Abbey was only loosely structured, and only certain parts of that structure were mandatory. Breakfast was one of those, but lunch was a have it when you have it sort of thing. Whoever was on kitchen duty for the day would be happy to serve whoever came in through the lunch period.

"Lunch is usually leftovers from last night's dinner," Ari chattered as they began walking towards the building where meals where held. "But it's always still really good. I'm a terrible cook so I never sign up for kitchen duty, but Lira is an Autumnborn and she is brilliant at hearth magic, so her lunches are divine. She's on the roster today, so it'll be delicious."

---

Ari shook her head and pulled herself back from the memory. She did miss Lira's cooking, but she couldn't risk hovering too close to those memories. She couldn't risk accidentally walking into herself and changing those bits of her reality.

The work bell chimed, ringing out over the entire grounds of the War Abbey, so she stood up, adjusted her robe, and headed to the alchemy lab where she was on the roster for production work. She'd applied for a research position, but didn't have the experience needed for that. Production shifts, though boring and repetitive, would give her more experience so she could try again for a research position the following year.

In the meantime, she readied herself for another afternoon of making potions and salves to supply the armies and intelligence agencies who were actively defending the land from invasion.

---

Ari wove a thread from the main design of the tapestry to the new bit she'd started working on. It would be easier if she'd used a mechanical loom, shuttle moving between the warp threads, but doing so would limit what patterns she could weave into her Great Work, so she worked in the ancient way, with the warp threads strung on a frame, and the weft threads woven by hand, bit by bit, moving to various parts of the tapestry as she decided what to fill the holes with.

This was not her first tapestry. She'd made many others. Not well, at first. But she'd mastered her craft years ago, and this piece she'd been working on for so long that she couldn't remember exactly how long it had been.

She began to fill in the background design around a motif she'd recently finished and let her thoughts drift once again through the memories of her long life.

I've been playing with them a bit. $20 here. $50 there. Just enough to see what they do without risking a catastrophic loss. Not putting bill money in there. Though that can be tempting because the APR on some of the LPs is mind-boggling. I'm doing one that's over 300% APR on my own, and participating in a trading DAO that's doing one that's currently got 3000% APR.

I'm not gonna write a bunch about Liquidity Pools here today. There's other great articles out there, just Google and you'll find some. Or search Farcaster - more and more people are putting out great stuff now that they can earn Moxie and use that to participate in Moxie LPs to earn even more.

This is about my work with the Goddess of Money - Juno Moneta.

When I "work" with a deity, it's all in my head. I'm not a formal ritualist. I just get into the right headspace and "have a chat".

Is it actually a deity or just mental LARPing?

Honestly?

I don't care.

That doesn't really matter to me.

It's a mystical experience and part of how it works is letting it continue to be a mystery.

I do argue with Them about their existence though... I'm strictist of terms, I'm a monist atheist. The Universe just is, and we are the Universe trying to figure out what it wants to be next.

Anyway...

I was sitting in meditation one day, entering that particular headspace where I chat with Juno Moneta about money stuff.

She is, after all, literally the Goddess of Money, as the Moneta aspect of Juno is where we even get the word "money". She was Guardian of the Treasury and Roman coins were minted in her image. "Mint" is also derived from her name.

I "met" her one day when I was doing a money mindset exercise from some money mindset guru or other a decade or so ago when that was The Thing going around the online space I inhabited. The idea was to meet your "money lover." Imagine money is your lover, how would you seduce them sort of thing. For most others following along, they imagined someone hot, maybe a fave celebrity.

What came to me was a very Roman Goddess.

I didn't work with any mythological deities at that point. The focus of my spiritual practice was a made up Goddess I call Paradox, and she'd already led me on wild adventures, but that's another story.

So I do a quick Google to find this Goddess of Money, and discover Juno Moneta. Yeppers, that was her. Okay... what to do with this...

The answer was, just keep working with her and see where it leads.

Where it has led?

Consistently growing income without a job. Self-employed content creating with a constantly growing audience cuz I get biz advice from the Goddess of Money.

Bought a house. Goddess of Money nudged me to post on a particular day on Twitter even though I never use Twitter, and ended up with 1/4 of the funds to buy my house sent to me on Cashapp by Jack Dorsey.

So yeah, I keep following her advice.

And now?

She led me to crypto, and to Farcaster.

Where things are just popping off for me in ways I could not at all have anticipated.

Which is why today, I'm learning about Liquidity Pools and the various risks associated with them.

Because Thursday is for money. It's the day that I spend my meditations focused on that "Juno Moneta" headspace, sorting through my budget, and learning about money topics. Figuring out how to get past the financial plateau I hit the last couple years.

What I can tell you from my meditations is that Juno is meh about Bitcoin, but really likes ETH and SOL for their utility beyond just currency that has the potential to lead to radical new ways of governance and organization that can truly be positive-sum for all of us, not just an elite few.

She's currently hot on $Moxie and $Degen, kinda meh about a lot of the others, but LOVES that people are gradually taking the ownership of currency into their own hands - I had a vision of her in chains many years ago, surrounded by men in suits with tickers covering the walls, chipping away at her golden form, handing out slivers to the masses while they kept the bulk for themselves...

Fun Fact: We don't own fiat currency. The state does. It loans it to the banks who loan it to the companies who use it to pay wages, and then we pay taxes that function as interest payments back to the state so it'll keep the whole scheme going.

So Thursday is for money, because Thursday is associated with Jupiter, husband of Juno, and fuck him, he's part of the power structure that subdues abundance in the first place, and their marriage was not at Her will. I give Her the day rather than her husband as Western astrology has.

She's not led me astray before, and I'm delighted with where she has led me so far.

Gwynne