Why “Load-Bearing” is a good name.

I hate writing.

Rather, I hate writing longform. Maybe it’s the legacy of being AuDHD inside a 1990s education system that shoved the five-paragraph essay down my throat, but whatever it is, I hate it. But for some damn reason you sickos like blog posts more than threads on Bluesky. Seems weird to me, because I think it’s super natural to want to interject after every single thought but you want me to stay quiet till the end? Gross. No wonder neurotypicals are boring.

Anyway, that’s why this blog exists and why I’m writing this post. It’s also why I’m going to snark about a lot of things here. If neurotypicals make me write long-form because for some reason it’s “better” to “organize your thoughts so there’s a clear through line” I’m just going to keep pointing out how you all should be better at keeping up with me and mine, who can have five levels of conversation in eight dimensions and three timestreams all at once. My attention isn’t the problem, you just aren’t giving me anything sufficiently interesting to focus on! I swear. Keep up, Janice.

Aaaaaanyway, I’m writing this post about why I named my blog “Load-bearing,” because it’s the first blog post and I read you should tell people why you named your blog what you named it. Also, I think the name might annoy a lot of you because it’s what people call “Claudish,” which was first “Claudespeak,” then “Claudeish” and now “Claudish,” and just like that we’ve demonized a way that many people already wrote because an LLM that is probably overtrained on the words of highly intelligent and hyperverbal people took the overrepresented words and encoded that as slightly higher weights and temperatures and now we’ve gone and made that a symbol of people NOT being smart. Great, just great. I just watched a very smart person I love get accused of only using AI for work he did by hand because he writes like an adult and not a teenager. We’re doing so well.

Words have power. Inside that power are the systems that constrain or empower people. These systems shape much of what we all think, do, and say, whether we admit it or not - and often even moreso when we don’t admit it. These systems have power over who is safe and who is at risk, who is rich and who is poor, who is loved and who is shunned. We don’t get to opt out of these systems; try as we might and as much as we might love to (and boy, would we fucking love to!), they pull us back in and form around the spaces we make outside them. And they do all of this with words. Words that are spoken. Words that are written. Words create thoughts create actions create systems create actions create thoughts create words, and the cycle continues. If we think the words we use or don’t use lack meaning or power, then we miss the opportunity to acknowledge when we are abusing that power or identify when we can use that power to shift things so that we bring a bit more justice and fairness to the world, and maybe make it better for all the people that get shat on all the time.

This blog is about that, if it’s about anything. This blog is about what words mean in the context of how people think. What systems are where, where you can apply leverage to those systems to break them, to control them, to bolster them. This blog is about how you change systems and structures by placing your foot on the part that is the weakest or ensure that you don’t break a system you like by ensuring you don’t create more strain than you need to in order to make the moves you need to make to get things done. In other words, this blog is all about the things that are load-bearing in our society, and how often we all fight to pretend they aren’t, especially those of us who really like the way the world is, at least insofar as we are happy to let some people have shittier lives so that we can have at least the lives we currently have. I think that’s bullshit, and so I’m going to show you how to blow all that up and make life better for everyone, even the people who will hate it because they’ll have to give up some of the things that feel good but turn them into monsters.

also, I fucking promised Belle @ the late summer lock-in that I’d write every day and asked them to hold me accountable so it’s 10:30 at night and I’m finishing this thing even though I don’t want to publish it.

We all deserve to be freer than we are, but you gotta know where to push to make it happen.

Welcome to Load-Bearing.