HWFO May 2022 Housekeeping

And a super long podcast, and some stuff I shit out of Ableton

Jun 01, 2022

This month was a busy one at HWFO. Five new articles, covering abortion law, obese SI models, contagion effect in trans kids, guns, and a weird creative writing piece about corporate bullshit words, replete with musical accompaniment.

But the coolest addition to HWFO lore is probably the appearance on Cactus Chu’s Metapolitics Podcast. It’s almost four hours long, and ties four years worth of HWFO material together into one cohesive dialogue in a way I haven’t encountered on any prior podcast. The severe lack of a time constraint probably contributed to that. If you’re going to give it a listen, just pause it here and there and bookmark your spot. I think it turned out well.

Subscription

This publication is and will always remain free to read, and any money earned through Substack subscriptions or Patreon will be dutifully spent on the author’s alcohol fund. But to give something back to the readers, anyone who does contribute to said alcohol fund will gain access to a private Slack server to discuss HWFO topics with other HWFO readers (and me) outside the public eye. Around 150 people are yammering away in there right now, and some of the article topics are born from these discussions. I’ll post an updated access link in a few days, as subscriber only content. If you’re a Patreon supporter you can gain access too, just email me.

Mission

Handwaving Freakoutery (HWFO) began as a Medium publication in 2018 primarily geared toward mathematical analysis of gun violence in the USA, examining media narratives, disproving many popular ones, and offering alternatives. As we went down this journey together, we discovered that media falsehoods are driven largely not by shadowy actors attempting to manipulate the narrative, but by market forces requiring the media to adopt false narratives for profit, both inside and outside the gun space. We later began to understand that the media behavior is connected to the evolution of culture, so we developed a framework for speaking of cultures themselves, and examined how the internet is increasing the rate of cultural evolution, how the media is connected to this rate increase, how the divergent cultures themselves are fueling the culture war, and how all of this indicative of various doomsdays.

HWFO pivoted to Substack in 2021 because Substack is way cooler for various reasons. One of the things Substack is worse at, however, is having multiple tabs where I can index articles for prior reading, grouping them by topic. So we’ll do that here, and we’ll update this post once per month as I continue to migrate Medium material over to Substack, supplementing with new articles as I go.

Handwaving Freakoutery

HWFO May 2022 Housekeeping

And a super long podcast, and some stuff I shit out of Ableton

Subscription

Mission

Index by Topic

General

Guns

Culture / Culture War

Media

Covid

Environmentalism

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