You show up for your first time in the Bay Area. You’ve heard wondrous things. The trans-humanist ideals. Galaxy-scale terraforming, curing aging and disease and bringing people back to life. Experiences and foods you could hardly imagine. People could embody life as catgirls or dragons or capybaras.
You walk through the open doors of a suburban old-timely building. Pale paint, colorful highlights. The place is…. nice, I guess. It’s clean and renovated and nicely laid out. There are some IKEA couches and carpets and fake plants. Even a few nice LED lamps and strips.
You grab a bag of plain salt chips plus a vanilla Soylent from the fridge, and walk up to the nearest small crowd, who are speaking passionately and with interest. Some of the twinkish guys are wearing hoodies and jeans, while the others wear a t-shirt and sweatpants. They have the same basic haircut, plus or minus a step on the Norwood scale. One of them has started taking a finasteride recently.
You excitedly listen to the people whose posts you have read online.
“So where did you get your Reta from? Do you have any spare you could sell?”
“No, I left it back home, I just chose a supplier from Finnrick. They aggregate purity test results for most of the grey-market sellers”
Wait… OMG, could it really be them?
You recognize them because they had a slightly interesting hat. They had that cool LessWrong post recently. You excitedly listen to them for a while, but are too shy to make conversation before they leave.
You disperse and hear another group. They all look similar. But you are no longer the only girl this time.
“Yeah it’s great, I got Claude Code to build me an automation. Whenever someone likes my post on Substack, I get notified via a message on discord, oh it’s broken one minute let me fix it….”
The evening goes by. These people get it. You love every minute.
Or so you would have thought in the past. You go home.
You go back to your room, and go back to watching Pluribus. “Hah, this is so mundane. The hivemind has all the intellect of humanity, yet spend it so mundanely. Drinking slop, sleeping in warehouses, the world looks so plain. Where is the flavor?”
Yet you are left with an inkling feeling. You showed up to, perhaps, one of the most trans-humanist spaces in the world. And the best they have is IKEA bamboo and tech branded hoodies, just like the rest of the bay area.
The people are kind and thoughtful, if sometimes awkward. They listen to your points and consider your counterargument carefully. They are so interesting sometimes.
But where is the fun? Where are catgirls?
You come back much later. As you grow and change, this place stays the same.
“I like your ears” someone says as you walk in, wearing an outfit that mixes elements of Japanese and Western clothing. You can’t speak, so need to whip out your laptop, and start typing.
“ty” gets converted to “Thank you” and gets vocalized with the local TTS model.
“Oh yeah you were the one who can not speak. I read your post.”
You have become the fun cat-girl you wanted to see.
Somehow by just asking people, you have also monopolized the head-rubs market, almost without action or thought. Some think you are slightly weird, but most think you are just kinda based.
But you have a vision for things to be better. And so you scheme.
“Yeah I would totally be a catgirl/catboy, but that seems like it would be kinda embarrassing. What would other people think?” This is the 4th person you hear say this today.
You have your opinions on cat ears.
Japan’s finest cat ears are, of course, produced by Assist Wig. The “Animal Ears With Wire Binaural Set”. These ears are thick, have hair-like texture, and a 3-dimensional curve. Yet they are still subtle enough to be classy, and clip-on to be minimally interfering. You’ve worn these daily since going to Cospatio in Akhibara.
Days go by, but it gets lonely being the only catgirl, and being unable to speak. Though it does make conversational dynamics more interesting.
I wish more people lived up to their ideal selves, tried to make things interesting too.
You become close friends with the cute goth girl who stays here too. But it’s not enough.
You slowly make friends with others too. What you used to find so fun, you look at and now feels so mundane. They are nice and friendly and give you head rubs. Are there things you could do to reduce the mundanity too?
You test out giving someone your spare pair of cat ears, and they love it. Hypothesis confirmed. There is a fair coming up soon, so you start scheming.
You go on assist-cosplay, and with tax and shipping from Japan, you manage to spend over 400 USD cat ears.
The day before the fair, your delivery has arrived. 25 pairs of cat ears ready to be given out. You have found the most promising candidates, and begin to distribute them to these people.
What was originally a day to “celebrate writing”, you have successfully co-opted into also being a catgirl and catboy awareness day. Some people are skeptical, but soon enough, you begin to run out of ears. People begin to comment “hey, could I get some cat ears too?”. Others notice too “Wow, so many people wearing cat ears, it’s quite cool”.
No longer is being a catgirl an endangered class, but people see it as almost a new normal.
Almost a new normal.
As the day fades, people leave. As the day pass, few continue to wear cat ears. Though some rare few continue to wear them, many choose to keep the cat ears to be in their personal stores, maybe reserved for some few days such as Halloween or something, or maybe a themed party.
But maybe at least one or two could be inspired. And maybe a brave few will carry on the torch as you leave.
Commentary
Ok, to be clear, I still think Berkeley and SF are just one of the best places in the world to be right now. Things are happening here, people care to get things done, you can feel the AGI as you speak to most people. Many places are quite nice and care to understand things, there are outdoor areas with greenery, but I feel like there is still so much missed opportunity.
I get people are busy and working on real things, I am glad for this. I know it’s “just aesthetics”, but it’s also a kind of lack of caring. And I find this kind of sad.
When you go to places that would easily be ranked as like, top-10 transhumanist place on earth, you expect something cooler than just a nice work space. Not everyone needs to be a catgirl. But it’s so boring when most people here can imagine abolishing death, but not imagine being slightly embarrassing. At least it’s nice that there are at least a few people trying things.
This post hits a really specific nerve for me. As a fellow catgirl, I find myself getting caught up in the (potentially false) dichotomy between my community of cat/dog/thing friends and the SF-associated crowd of tech-adjacent people taking frontier AI progress seriously. In a way, I feel like aspects of my life are the mirror image of what you are talking about in this post; I have a great community of IRL animal friends but getting any of them to take topics that smell of bay-area-vibes/rationalism seriously is such an uphill battle.
Which is all a lot of words to say I really appreciate and respect the niche that you occupy! You post at the intersection of a lot of worlds (that I didn't realize could cross) and I think that is very cool.
I'm not situated in the Bay Area, but I *do* habitually wear a cat-ears headband when I go out to interact with people. It'd be better if it could be more always-on—if I could also wear it habitually at home, when going on walks by myself, et cetera—but wearing headbands for extended times makes me very headache-prone, and I've grudgingly compromised in the "only for ~public-facing activity" direction to mitigate that. But, yeah, I sure do seem to get decently-many people complimenting my cat ears (including at rat-ish meetups when I go to those) and far fewer people following in my footsteps, and the latter is somewhat sad.
With that said: I've experimented only minimally with clip-on cat ears, so far, and been dissatisfied with the results, while your top favorite model is apparently of the clip-on variety. So: do you have advice on how to make them hold a stable position relative to one's head, when clipped on? I keep having a problem with mine where they end up pretty substantially floppy, clipped onto my hair not-quite-at-the-root and thus with a bunch of leeway to shift positioning and angle relative to my head (in a "blatantly not actually properly attached" way, not a cute emotive way) rather than clipped right by the root where they'd (I assume?) be stable. I have yet to figure out any way to achieve the latter result reliably, and would be interested in any insights you might have in that direction.