Weekly Catch#3.4: (notes) while Playing 🎣

Maintenance, A Message To Garcia, Machines, Seduction, Jesus, Touch, & Stablecoins

Announcements:

• My biggest obstacle is with navigating rhetoric¹: How do you reach a world so poorly trained in reason and wisdom yet controlled and overloaded with senses and information?

• I’ve come across a gold mine of new wisdom reading the gospels left out of the new testament, forcing me to rethink the entire Christian religion and how Paul might have distorted Jesus’s work while rationalizing him as a Jew and needing to scale him to the world.

  • if you’ve read epistle-i, you know scale is a sensitive process in regard of maintaining original truth and values…

barely made it eh…in deep this week, so I’ll keep it sweet:

Maintenance w/ twin Stewart Brand

Brand shares that maintainers are causation experts who work backwards to determine when and where there is a problem and how to find the source.

paradox of maintenance: “Maintenance is absolutely necessary and maintenance is optional. It is easy to put off, yet it has to be done. Defer now, regret later. Neglect kills.” (pg.7)

random fact that the global cost of corrosion² is $2.5 trillion a year. so we better check that:

“The need for maintenance doesn’t stop when usage stops. The upkeep of any machine is largely about tending to the four sources of most problems: moving parts, flowing fluids, flowing electricity, and temperature stresses. Every bit of the moving, flowing, and stressing causes wear and tear, but damage also comes from not moving, flowing, or stressing. Nonmoving parts seize up. Non-flowing fluids leak or curdle into gunk. Rubber starts to rot. Corrosion gets into everything.” (pg.54)

“To push through frustration takes a level of zeal that he calls gumption. But certain situations in a repair job “destroy enthusiasm,” he says, “and leave you so discouraged you want to forget the whole business. I call these things ‘gumption traps.” (pg.59)

“Value rigidity is one hang-up in mechanics. Another, he proposes, is an oversize ego and the defensiveness that goes with it. You need an unhindered, open mind to detect subtle signals from the machine you’re trying to repair. If you can’t think that way, Pirsig has a profound suggestion: Just fake it. Pretending to be open-minded can work well enough to reward you into gradually developing the real thing. (This works for a great many desired practices.) Another hang-up is anxiety. When you’re in a state of agitation, Pirsig writes, you fix things that don’t need fixing and chase after imaginary ailments. You jump to wild conclusions and build all kinds of errors into the machine because of your own nervousness.”(pg.59)

“Just owning and using something is not yet mastery. We need a basic intelligibility to our possessions: in their provenance, in their principles of operation, in their logic of repair and maintenance.” (pg.63)

“It was a triumph of Rousseau’s romanticism over Enlightenment rationality. Craft was extolled; uniformity was deplored. That sentiment would bedevil technical progress ever after. Romantics always side with John Henry against the Rationalists’ steam drill. But I propose that in all cases of machines threatening labor, it’s worth looking closely at the welfare of the customers as well as the workers. Blanc’s use of gauges to make interchangeable parts did indeed threaten the practices of the gunsmith’s guild. But the guild, like others at that time, was secretive, intensely protective, conservative, and politically powerful.” (pg.95)

“Defeating rust is an endless drudgery of oiling, greasing, brushing, scraping, cleansing, swabbing, painting, repainting, re-repainting, and finally discarding…We want to make rust just go away, and it just won’t. So we negotiate.” (pg. 233)

I loved this book so much, but only because I am also guilty of this; my feedback is that Brand’s scholarship feels overshadowed with so many quotes and ideas dropped on behalf of his interlocutors instead of taking more ownership of his own medium.

the man Who can

A Message To Garcia - If you don’t, who will? Everyone wants the title, but few want to be the messenger delivering the "Letter." In 1899, Elbert Hubbard, Fra Elbertus, wrote a 3 page essay that shortly became a global phenomenon. It was about a man named Rowan who was told to find a General in the Cuban jungle. Read this whenever you feel like the status, gratification, or busy work takes priority of your mission. Be the person who carries the message to Garcia.

hu-Man-wo v. Machine

How can I get my tools to share my goals rather than making producing for me?

Mixing art and business is an interesting experience. Art teaches you that all safety is an illusion, things can go wrong and they will, but ME wrongfully trusting the safety I experienced from the machine is where it mostly went wrong. Safety and accurate prediction isn’t even guaranteed with machines, optimization is.

In the privacy of my chrysalis, I can sit with my machines and fail a lot. But in business, failure can cost you time, money, and resources... you can’t just keep failing—I almost broke my machine… I just wanted it to know what I wanted it to do and do it. Whilst, the machine is sitting there engineered to know it’s order of operations and is needing me to command it properly.

just watched All Dogs Go To Heaven so

James and our machines taught me a lot this week. One, I really don’t listen, I float by trying to translate symbols for “efficiency” but I am not a machine... which is why I failed to understand that if I don’t know my goals, I can’t steer my machine. My impulsivity pushed us back behind schedule. Two, my human intelligence compliments. Images are my first language, but what stillness reveals sometimes automatically is the meaning beneath them so that I can translate it to the machine. Third, when I pay sharp attention, seeing the details helps me decide how to move smarter.

“The machine does not know what you are trying to do, you have to watch it and guide it in the direction you want it to go. You know its limitations when you are paying attention, know your goals, why a error is happening, and what is missing.”

- James

How do I deserve such a wonderful teammate in this game of life?

Spectacle Rules: Step 1 Seduction 🇨🇺

Seduction is desire meeting strategy, which I think is a very useful tool in strategizing spectacle. My biggest design and execution pet peeves are bullshit symbols and bullshit spectacle. Here’s what I learned about Rumba in Cuba from Chen Lizra:

1. Attraction - The first step is establishing a connection(bridge).

2. Triggering - Hit those emotional buttons to lure desire out. Show someone what they are missing, and then give it to them.

3. Fearlessness - Go after what you want completely fearless of getting hurt or rejected. Without self-confidence you can’t go after what you want.

4. Feedback Loop - Seduce over and over again, making them feel desired and special, even after hearing no a couple of times, you are slowly sneaking into their hearts and desires, no becomes maybe and maybe becomes yes.

Seduction can be utilized like water within us, the reason aspect is knowing how to use it and when to use it properly, seduction can help you build connection to get you what you want, seduction is an art that comes from the heart, but reason is from the mind so when you bring them together persuasion and communication are peak.

Some revelations on Jesus in reading the Revelations

Having intense feelings about altruism being a moral failing for human way of life… I am increasingly getting more and more suspicious of Christianity as I read Mark, not of Jesus, but the institution that Paul created. Humanity needing a savior over a messenger for us to save ourselves does not sit right in my spirit… especially historically, an interesting investigation for sure.

MacKenzie Fisher (MK)@philosofounder_

Matthew 25-27 with Girard on my heart. You might know Jesus as God, but think of him as Son of Man. Jesus’s villain was no devil, no great evil—it was the people. The people ultimately called for him to be crucified. They didn’t fight to save an innocent man. And on top of that.

7:19 PM · Feb 4, 2026 · 38 Views

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1 Reply

MacKenzie Fisher (MK)@philosofounder_

Anywho, head racing back to this idea: Society teaches that transcendence means sacrifice because they're teaching people to try 'to be' Jesus or one with him. He understandably is an inspirational model, but fact is...we’re no Gods. We’re animals endowed a divine faculty. For

5:32 AM · Feb 9, 2026 · 22 Views

just Touch Things man

Captain Picard: [touching the Phoenix] I must have seen this ship a hundred times in the Smithsonian, but I was never able to touch it.

Data: Does tactile contact alter your perception of the Phoenix?

Picard: Yes. For humans, touch can connect you to an object in a very personal way. It makes it seem more real.

Data: [touches the ship] I am detecting imperfections in the titanium casing. Temperature variations in the fuel manifold. It is no more real to me now than it was a moment ago.

[Riker enters, amused]

Riker: Would you three like to be alone?

xD

— Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

Touching my tools… my phone and computer are engineered to try and steer me. I never realized how important touch was with technology until I got an iPad and felt the differences between it and my Daylight. When I focused on how each felt in my hand, the first thing I noticed was temperature: the titanium felt cold, while the rubber on the Daylight felt warmer.

Even comparing the pencil tips, the friction of pressing a pen down onto the screen and seeing it wear down felt more real with the Daylight pen than with the Apple Pencil, that almost hovers upright, gliding uncontrollably, distant from the screen.

My Apple products feel reptilian to me. The blue light and the MacBook’s design burn my eyes. However, I still want more from Daylight... Just because something doesn’t feel like a chunk of metal in my hand doesn’t mean plastic and rubber are the final answer either.

🇺🇸 Stablecoin Future ????

Free markets require free individuals. Stablecoins are digital tokens pegged 1:1 to the U.S. dollar and backed by reserves like U.S. Treasuries, cash, or short-term bonds. They matter because they’re programmable money—you can embed conditions into transactions, automate payments, and settle nearly instantly without traditional banking intermediaries. Autonomous systems need money they can exchange algorithmically.

When people hold stablecoins instead of bank deposits, value can move peer-to-peer without passing through commercial bank balance sheets. This doesn’t automatically eliminate Federal Reserve control, but it can shift where deposits sit and how liquidity circulates. If scaled massively, it could reduce the banks’ role in credit creation.

In theory, local communities could issue tokenized dollar claims backed by real assets, increasing transparency and potentially enabling more localized capital formation. Free markets require free individuals. Technology that increases transparency and improves capital allocation—without replacing human judgment—could expand economic agency rather than centralize it within the federal government.

1. the form of communicating the context

2. a decay of infrastructure