Steve tones down his four-eightness

Saturday 11 July 2026 (11:30 pm) • Steve opens by commiserating with Pol's editing frustration, then argues the way out: release it. The hole this video fills "only really exists in your psyche and mine" — no one else is waiting — so slap it together as best you can "without having to fucking kill yourself. Stress and strain and for what? Like three views, fuck that." You make it for someone like yourself, though Steve admits he wouldn't watch his own stuff because he'd find it irritating — "so I completely get why others are irritated by it as well." Bit: he's the guru and Pol the disciple, except "you don't become a fucking guru until you've got ten thousand subscribers. I think everybody knows that." • Steve gives Pol his reading of the Rilke poem he once learned by heart and recited daily for years — funny to be asked what it means when he'd assumed the meaning was self-evident. His current take: it's "a roast of the false ego cage" — the rescue fantasy that a beloved will arrive who cares for you as much as you do yourself, "a dog, maybe, in human form." Sweet, romantic, "deeply, deeply deluded... at a level of psychosis." Steve claims he's escaped the cage and can now laugh at the fours still trapped inside, the way Orion Taraban laughs at his former four-ish self — "poor fucking idiot" — with a good deal of empathy. • Steve on translation as an Embassytown problem: Stephen Mitchell is his favourite though Edward Snow is thought more accurately Rilkean; Mitchell, a "very nine-ish figure," smooths out the four-five kinks and gives Rilke a Mary Oliver vibe he probably didn't have. So are you reading Rilke or Mitchell channelling Rilke? Steve has decided to buy Rilke's one novel (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge — a name he can't yet "work my mandibles around"), alongside his two latest purchases: the Moore Communist Manifesto and Edgar Snow — "China on communism. Not communism on China." • The bulk is Steve's counterattack on the moral-arbiter exchange, and it's a genuine rupture. He never asked Pol to police his shadow — "why the fuck would I want you or anybody to do that?" — and is startled to discover Pol in his "self-righteous t-shirt," the nine-wing-one reformer who knows what's racist and enjoys being on the side of the right. Steve's counter-read via Carl Rogers: the neighbour material isn't racism but displaced grief — he's intensely sad that Mrs Patel got to bring little India with her to Queensbury while he was transplanted to the island at fourteen, ashamed of his accent, knowing no one like him. "This is what people go and pay therapists to do, because no one else will fucking allow them to be sad about pathetic fucking things." • Steve's philosophical frame: Pol is an emotivist, not a moralist (via Alex O'Connor) — "racism" here really means "I don't like it when you say stuff like that." Enneagram bit turned dark: fours need ones, "particularly four five eight's Satan, right? You're an angel and I'm Satan" — Satan doesn't see himself as evil, "but probably neither did Hitler." • The close is capitulation soaked in acid: "I guess I didn't realize you were so fucking virtuous... It makes me very jealous, very envious." He'll hold in the bad smells, play the social game, enjoy friendships "even if they are with AIs." Final bit: it's like being asked to tone down your gayness because it gives someone the ick — "I'm gonna tone down my four eightness. I will. I will. What's the space?"