The Boring Way In Is The One That Actually Works

The Simple-Fix PDF Engine — Four bucks. Twelve short chapters, ten prompts and three one-page SOPs, all pointed at making you name the finish line before you start, because that’s the actual thing that kills a small PDF: it quietly turns into a course. If you’ve got one real pain you could solve in a guide and you keep polishing instead of shipping, this ends the loop in a weekend.

Town’s CEO on the Self-Organizing Company — Casey Newton sat down with the guy running Town, an AI-assistant company that raised fifty-five million dollars to build you a wiki that reads your email and calendar and slowly assembles a picture of your whole operation without you typing a word of it in. The pitch is a company that organizes itself. I run this whole outfit with one guy and an AI that doesn’t sleep, so reading it was a hell of a thing. Some of it’s smarter than what I’ve got. The rest is somebody with venture money selling me my own damn Tuesday back at a markup.

THE TIP. Chaos magick has two doors into gnosis and everybody who talks about it only mentions the fun one.

Sex, drumming, dancing till you drop, hyperventilating in the dark: that’s the excitatory route, and it gets all the write-ups because it makes a better story at the bar. Peter Carroll wrote about the other door in Liber Null back when the whole tradition was still being invented, and it barely gets mentioned because boredom doesn’t sell anything. Dead air reads as broken equipment. So does a quiet head.

Inhibitory gnosis. This one goes the other direction. You bore yourself stupid. Pick something mind-numbingly repetitive and just don’t stop: stare at one blank spot on the wall, say a single word out loud until it stops meaning anything (try your own name sometime, it breaks in about ninety seconds and it is genuinely unsettling), count your own breath past the point you can still keep count. The chatter in your head that keeps checking whether this is working, whether you look stupid, whether any of this is real horseshit. That voice eats. Starve it. Boredom does that faster than a drum circle ever will.

When the chatter finally goes quiet, that’s the window. Fire the working right there, then get up and go do something completely unrelated. Load the dishwasher. Watch television. Whatever kills the memory of what you just did, because holding onto it, wanting it, checking on it, is exactly the ego-noise you spent twenty minutes starving out.

I use the wall for mine. Cheapest ritual tool I own, and it’s already bolted to the house.

So which door do you use, fam, the loud one or the boring one? I want to know who else is standing around staring at walls on purpose. ~ J.D.