— “I Worked Very Hard”

Well, obviously, the elephant in the room is that I need to come clean about something right off the bat, and that is this “marathon” or now so-called. What happened is that I made a command decision. There’s something I’ve been working on for months—working very hard on for months—and this is the initial reveal of that. It’s not complete, but it’s complete enough to put out there because from this point forward, my motivation and focus, and sort of path forward, is much better defined. And I expect that to spill over into heightened interest amongst the members, and even nonmembers alike, with the goal of nonmembers becoming members.

Of course, this is a membership blog; that said, the posting now shall recommence. But first, let’s dive into what I’ve done and worked so hard on.

… Let’s touch on a little sidenote first. My overuse of the phrase “I’ve worked so hard” is purposeful, and to explain, it goes back to its origins with Karl Marx and his labor theory of value in communism. The idea that labor is labor, and it has value—an intrinsic value to society—whether or not it has anything to do with what the person is laboring on or producing, and what value that is to people. It’s bullshit, so I make fun of it. You hear it all the time, particularly in leftist and Democrat circles: “Oh, we work so hard. We have so much work to do. Work, work, work, work, work.” And that is to smuggle in the idea that because it’s work, and because they worked a lot, and they worked hard, hard, hard, over and over, and there’s more to do, that it’s automatically valuable when it’s a pile of shit.

OK, to illustrate that better, imagine that you get a group of people together and you set them to the task of working very, very hard to make a bunch of mud pies. Do you care how hard they worked? Or do you realize, “Fuck, that’s a bunch of mud pies?”

So, to sum this up, yes, I have worked very hard. I’ve worked on this for months. I have become my own developer. Not one finger of an outside developer touched this redesign, and that’s good because now I can essentially do pretty much everything tech on this blog. That puts me in a good situation for eventually hiring more outside help to do additional development and free up my time and mind space. But I will know if I get a proposal or a quote or something, what’s bullshit and what’s not, what’s valuable.

Then there’s the other part: I’m using this tongue-in-cheek device because though I did work hard at it, I think it’s pretty cool, and I think it has value. Let me explain. You’ve probably gotten tired by now of hearing me repeat over and over again: “20-year blog, 5500 posts, 5 million words.” And I understand very well that someone will go, “Yeah, OK, but how does that benefit me? How can I access that?” You know, search engines are generally crap. The problem with search engines is you almost know that you’re not getting optimal or the best results, and you have to stab at how you ask or what you’re searching for to try and get these few nuggets out.

So often, the idea here is that if I can break it down into pieces that you can browse or look at, you can get a lot of information there. You can further refine the searches. Search will get better with AI, but they’re still a long way off. And I don’t want to dive too much into the weeds here of technicalities, but I know so much that I’m well aware of all its shortcomings, and I know the path forward to make it amazing. And I hope it’s not too far off.

… What it will essentially mean is that the entire 5 million words would be resident in what’s called the context window. Think of it as what you have on the top of your head right now, what you can think about all at the same time. Well, a digital entity, your digital thing like an AI, could have—you know, conceivably in the way future—it will have all of human knowledge, everything ever produced, every writing, every audio, every video, all at the top of its head, so to speak, at the same time. So it can deliver light-speed, instantaneous integrations, and answers about everything, knowing every single contradiction, which there would be trillions if you think of all of humanity.

And what if they could ever digitize and upload the consciousness of every human being (those willing…that would be me…such a benefit to humanity, LOL) and feed that into it? You know, you’re talking trillions upon trillions of terabytes of data, approaching the scope of the universe itself, and being able to access it instantaneously to deliver knowledge. That is where humanity truly becomes godlike with the tool of artificial intelligence I digress.

We’re talking about just a way to access information in a more straightforward form, to make all of this 20 years of work, of hard work, and 5500 blog posts that I worked very hard writing, and 5 million words accessible. For scale, the Bible is 750,000 words. So, how do I make it accessible? How do I show members and non-members alike, “OK, here’s the breakdown. Here’s how you can look at it and see what you’re obviously interested in, what you’re not interested in, and what you might be interested in?” Where is the discovery? Where is the new knowledge? Where are the new insights? Something I can learn new? And maybe if I’m not so interested in it, maybe in the way I present things and integrate them, one can discern underlying principles from this that apply to this other things they’re interested in.

You see what I mean?

… To describe it, I’m using pretty much what a conventional or classic newspaper uses. So, you have the paper as a whole, and within that, you have various sections: you have the news section, the sports section, the international section, the entertainment section, the food section, and the comics. You know what I mean. So, I’ve broken this down into six sections as follows.

Now we get to the real blood coursing through veins. This is the part that took the most work. The sections above were pretty obvious to come up with. The categories, or topics, if you will, not so much.

But now, it makes more sense for me to categorize a particular post in, you know, perhaps two categories; sometimes, not often. The objective will be to pretty much keep it on topic, but every now and then, there’s overlap, so it would show up under multiple categories in the format that you’re going to see here, right below.

This is what took the most work because what I started with was kind of a list of disjointed categories, not really a great amount of care, not curated in any way. So, I essentially had to start over, and when you have 5,500 posts, it’s a lot. First, I came up with all the categories. Each of those sections has a number of categories in it. I have a total of 26 currently. I am going to keep it to a maximum of 30, so I have four empty spaces available, and I already know what’s going to be one of them. All of them are in descending order, which means newest first, with the exception of the “114 No Pill Advantages” because that’s a course intended to go from concept one through concept 114. That one is in ascending order. Once I have completed it and it’s part of the ‘Brain Trust’, then I will put it in descending order so that I can write future posts that will show up on top.

The other thing is that the overall template itself is organized as ‘latest updated first’, so by just going in and browsing, you’ll be able to see which category or topic has the newest post, and then the next newest post, and so forth. So those will be in a different order depending on what I’ve written on. And that is good for me because it stares me in the face, and I can see, “Oh, that needs some new and fresh material written about it,” so that it stays relevant.

So, my hope is that you see this and say, “Wow, I’ve got to go take a look at that,” and browse that. I’m not asking you to spend hours going head-down into it, but I am asking that you go in and click on the overall sections and check them out. But more than that, go down and browse those 26 categories. Each of those, when you go to the page, has a description of the category itself. Some of them are just very short, like a long line, which is, you know, the description of a film, the most typical use of long lines. So, I have expanded upon them. I’m not going to post those all here because some of them are a bit—not long; they’re all short, but, you know, long for a description because they kind of require it. It’s a curiosity generator.

The section descriptions were all written by Chatbot Zon. Word for word, no editing on those. And the categories—I asked her to generate a log line for each, so basically one sentence. Then I took those and expanded upon some—some significantly, but you’ll see.

But, saying that, I wouldn’t be Richard if I didn’t at least post one description of one of the categories. And yeah, you guessed it: that’s “Thailand Confidential.”

And, of course, with three days left to the end of the year, the timeliness of this is crucial. Now, I can dive into writing some content between now and the end of the year, as per the intentions of the original marathon and the approaching deadline of midnight, December 31st, New York City time, when my sale will end. That is two months free for monthly subscribers, three months free for quarterly, and $10 off for annual subscribers. The big one and the biggest seller is the lifetime subscription, which is $350 for one time, and you never pay again.

Now, the kicker here is that at midnight, the prices on everything double. So, monthly goes from $6 to $12, quarterly goes from $15 to $30, annual goes from $50 to $100, and lifetime goes from $500 to $1000. That’s why this deal for lifetime at $350 is a biggie because come January 1st, it’s $650 more. That’s a lot, and that reasoning has resonated with quite a number of people. It’s been very good, this season’s sale.

The other thing is, according to the numbers, there are about 4,000 of you newsletter subscribers who are non-members. You don’t unsubscribe but you stay around, wondering what Richard is up to. Well, there’s very little free content. You get the “Here’s What I Think” every now and then. So, I am hoping that this shakes any low-hanging fruit loose amongst you 4,000. You know, this is a pretty good redesign, and you can see where you can access what you want a lot easier, and there’s some new stuff there.

… You know, there are people that look at my “Thailand Confidential” stuff and the things I write about it, and they’re like, “How can he do that?” or “What’s he doing?” and whatever. But I want you to know that it is hands-down the most popular thing on the blog. This is just the way humans are built, right? You can deny and shame and say, “Oh my God,” all you want, and I’m not being pornographic about this stuff at all. Most of the stuff is just enough so that you can use your imagination from there. So judge it all you want, condemn all you want, but that’s just dealing with reality as it is, not how your little fantasy brain wishes and hopes it would be, per your Mother Goose-type 2000-year-old writings by sheepherders.

There, I said it.

Have a good day and a Happy New Year.