A Bicycle Sailboat Trailer — It has been such a fast-paced summer and fall this year that I've hardly had time to write in this blog of mine. One of the things that's been taking up a lot of time has been sailing with my friends on beautiful Lake Mendota here in Madison. And one thing that I've thought would be fun to document here was exactly how I get my sailboat to the water. I don't like cars. In my fiction writing, the bad guys drive cars. I don't particularly want to own a ...

VRAIL Chapters 1 & 2 — This novel has been a long time coming, but I've finally finished my THIRD rewrite. But I feel it's well worth it. It finally fuses my love of psychological thriller, solarpunk sci-fi, and mystical fantasy all into one wild concoction. ...

FEDI-WATCH demo — A few months back I worked on a very lightweight prototype for a decentralized moderation app for the fediverse. I stalled out on the project when I couldn’t find collaborators who wanted to actually volunteer for moderation, but I had built a fairly interesting set of infrastructure to work on it. The Problem After the recent migration from Twitter to Mastodon, with more people of color migrating to that platform there were proven difficult. Online harassment, spam and other generally harmful interactions have weren’t being dealt with properly. On the ...

Musk's myopic centrism — Despite the meme, I have proof that Elon Musk does not play “4D chess.” That 4th D is supposed to be the time dimension, but despite being described as some forward thinking genius, Musk ultimately possesses a miniscule and static worldview. My proof is this seemingly innocuous meme that he posted a few months ago. This meme is meant to portray an insight into how the woke progressives have moved into the realm of the extreme while the pragmatic centrists have remained steadfastly true to their origin. In the meme ...

Socialism as Radical Entrepreneurialism — If there weren’t hundreds of years of propaganda in our collective psyche, we’d be able to recognize that the goals of free market entrepreneurialism and democratic market socialism are the same: empowerment for every working person and every entrepreneur. It just so happens that neither side realizes, those are the same people. I can still see the words written floor to ceiling across the wall of my company’s office. The CEO and founder of the company had asked for his personal motto, “OWN IT,” to be emblazoned on the wall ...

The Algorithmologists — The city at dawn Leo Rolé and eleven other Algorithmologists were drinking coffee or dragging on their vapor pipes under the dim amber lights of their city’s Algoritorium. Through the window looking out over the city, only a few apartments’ lights were starting to twinkle awake. In the distance, Leo could just see his own house’s kitchen window light up. His husband would be out there pouring his cup of coffee that moment. As more people woke up and logged on, the monitors at the front of the room started ...

Double Crux Station — Insignia of the Double Crux Assembly Welcome to Double Crux Station! We are the Philosopher’s Governing Assembly, and we’re so excited that you’ll be joining us to represent your village or neighborhood at the world’s first philosophically principled government body. This welcome packet will help orient you to our humble Station, and delineate the expectations set for you by all the Double Cruxers who came before you. We’re grateful that you have decided to participate in the preeminent decision-making institution on the planet, and hope you are proud to be ...

What separates utopia and dystopia? — Take a moment to think about all the possible futures you’ve ever seen presented in any of the various forms of science fiction media you’ve come across. Although many details may differ between the mutlitude of different worlds that artists and authors have depicted, when you boil them all down to their most fundamental core, there are only two possible future scenarios for humanity: a dystopian future or a utopian future. But what is the fundamental feature that makes the difference between a dystopian and a utopian world.? You might ...

Why a different shade of solarpunk — Solarpunk is in my opinion the movement for a better future. It embraces and amplifies the best parts of humanity: innovation, compassion resilience, freedom, and justice, and focuses our imagination into making those qualities the underpinning of our future society. I’ve become a solarpunk because I think this optimism is essential. In fact, I think the decline of optimism and the rise of “realism” in the 20th century, is the one thing that has stagnated humanity.  Word usage of "optimist" peaked in the 1920s, while usage of "realist" continued to ...

Scrap Wood Stool on a New Mexico Farm — I haven't had much time to myself for projects during my year-long bicycle tour, but while WWOOFing here on the Sheridan Project Farm in New Mexico this season, I've had a bit more free time to relax and get up to some hobbies. I've also had access to a lot of raw materials in the form of construction scrap, which got me thinking about what I could do to spruce up my partner's and my living accomodations. It's a small space, but in the lovely weather this spring, it's just ...

Building a website on Google Sheets — I haven't been writing on here lately as I've been very busy he;ping to build a cooperative bicycle touring platform that I'm helping to start. But I thought I would write down a quick tutorial since I've basically built the whole database to run for free on top of Google Sheets. Now the only really good reason to do this is that (1) it is free and (2) it can be edited very easily by non-developers. And I already know that if this platform takes off there will need to ...

Solarpunk 2050 — I recently read Bill Gates’ book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. While I have a huge problem with the book’s philosophy1, I have taken one thing away from it in this blog’s approach to advocating for a socialist revolution: work backwards from a goal and a long-term horizon. I know many people want a socialist revolution now, and they are working toward that goal either through political process or through yelling at other people on twitter. Sadly, I am one small person with limited ability to effect massive changes, ...

How Market Socialism Could Work — In 2018, Gallup conducted a poll to learn what most people in the US think of when they hear the word “socialism.” The poll compared responses in 2018 and 1949, and pointed out a big change in perception over the seven decades since the beginning of the Cold War. Gallup Poll on US understanding of the term "socialism" One of the most interesting findings is that over that time there has been a shift away from considering socialism to mean “state control of business” to meaning “equality” and “benefits and ...

Uprising Chess — What do you see when you look at a chessboard?  Two rows of expendable pawns march into battle to protect the interests of the nobility, convinced to fight solely because they happen to be a different color. Sacrificing their lives to protect a bumbling and ineffectual king.  The game itself is a blueprint for the kind of society the rulers wanted back when it was invented.  All of us regular people convinced to fight each other for the comfort of a few.         the chessboard is a ...

Carbon Fragility — Our climate is changing, possibly irreversibly. When asked in polls, most everyone understands this. We even know how to stop it and yet in our day-to-day public interactions, very few people seem to be willing to talk about any of this. I’ve developed a theory to explain this, and I’ve termed it Carbon Fragility, an environmental correlate to the phenomenon known as white fragility.  In white fragility, white people build defense mechanisms to avoid directly confronting their implicit role in upholding white supremacy.  In carbon fragility, people build defense mechanisms ...

The Last Highway — Their packs were light. The next research station was only a short ride over the crest, and the valley on the other side had a well-stocked food forest. “The ride up is steep,” Teris said, “ take it easy on the throttle, we don’t want to use up our battery too early.” “Why not?” Casim said, “we’ve got plenty of sun to recharge up there.” They hit the pedal and the electric motor whirred as they accelerated up the incline. “See you at the top!” Casim banked hard as they ...

What is involution — Last week a friend of mine from China introduced me to a new word that popped up in Chinese culture last year to describe the point where competition switches from being productive to destructive. It’s called involution and if you haven’t heard of it yet, you’re missing out on an important concept that helps explain the greatest paradox of our time: Why does everything keep feeling worse the harder we work to make things better? While the term was originally invented by anthropologists to describe a particular kind of agricultural ...

Class Warfare Chess Prototype — This post is out of date. There is a newer, better version of Class Warfare Chess described in this post The narrative embedded in the classic chess board is obvious. Two rows of unskilled and expendable pawns face off to protect the interests of the more talented nobility. All sacrificing everything to protect a bumbling ineffectual king. Well not anymore. It’s time to flip the tables. I wrote new rules for chess that pits the pawns against the nobles. But in this game, the nobles only maintain their special moves ...

A mixture of identifields — What are two totally different sides of your personality that kind of came together to form who you are today? I've always had a love of nature that kind of gave me a sense of awe and spirituality even though I've never been comfortable talking about it. At the same time, I've also always been into science fiction of the space and time travel variety. These stories gave me kind of an intellectual sense of imagination about how limited our current social values might be compared to all the possibilities ...

Three parts to changing the world — The process of changing the world has 3 interrelated parts: Acknowledge where we are Define where we want to be Take steps to move in the right direction In this essay I want to go into why it’s important to remember that all 3 parts have a place and not to let 1 part dominate the others. Criticism: acknowledging where we are Some academics and activists will focus themselves particularly on the first point, drawing much needed attention to the dire consequences of the existing racist, exploitative systems that we ...

More equal rights, more equal power — On tiktok and twitter, I’m seeing the hashtag #leftist trending for the first time in my life. People are coming out of the woodwork showing off their leftist pride. So what does it mean to be a leftist? Do you want to know if you might be a leftist? Sometimes people try to overcomplicate this question, but I’m a simple guy when it comes these ideas. So in this post I want to describe what it means to be a leftist in simple general terms. There are lots of nuanced ...

An introduction to directional radicalism — You might be like me. I’m a millennial living in the US, worried about being a good person and surviving. I was raised to think that politics was mostly just a mess that should be ignored, and that being “into politics” meant you were always pushing your own agenda. I thought politics was working right when Obama was in the White House and I could ignore it. I didn’t like the results in 2016, but, at the time, I thought the US was still a fundamentally fair and decent country. ...

On the emergence of post-speculative fiction — I just ran a work of speculative fiction through a piece of artificial intelligence software that once would have been called speculative. I'm realizing that we very well might be reaching a new era of science fiction and art. I'm wondering if we should call this era post-speculative. To Be Post-speculative Speculative fiction generally works within a world where some things (eg technologies, magic, historical governments) can work in ways where the reader has no way of foreseeing the ultimate impact of these things. This is in contrast to forms ...

One month into the Co-op Trail — I've been away from my computer for the most part this past month because I've been doing the hardest thing I've ever done before. In mid-june my partner and I quit our jobs and started touring on the tandem ebike we built last winter. Our route has thus far been darting around the Pacific Northwest as we aim to connect the dots between beautiful scenic attractions, cooperative businesses, and regenerative farms. For anyone who has tried it, you already know cycle touring isn't easy, but it feels especially intense coming ...

Solar Wagon: tandem ebike and solar charging trailer — My partner and I have dreamt of #VanLife for years, but I always worried about the awful carbon footprint of living on the move. A dream incubated in my head for a long while to make that lifestyle work in a downsized, ecologically conscious way. This past winter, I finally put together the pieces on this most ambitious project of my life thus far: a tandem electric bike with a solar charging trailer filled with all the essentials for life on the road. The goal of the solar charging trailer ...

Story2Hallucination: converting stories to deep learning GAN hallucinated animations — Late last year, I tried working on a method to use the text from my dynamically updating short story website, a.ttent.io/n, to generate hallucinatory animations. Back then, I was working off of earlier methods to do this sort of thing and wasn't having great results. But earlier this month OpenAI released a newer method called CLIP, which really improved the text-to-image generation results that I've seen. The focus of CLIP itself was originally for standalone image generation, and that seems to be what most people are doing with it. However, ...

oneth.club: an online discussion society designed to unite rather than divide — In early 2016, I wrote an app for my friends to submit and choose articles for our reading/discussion group. The idea was simple: the ones in the groups who would get to choose the next article would be the ones who were the most engaged with the previous one. During our discussion group, we came up with a simple system, but as we used it, we started to contemplate how the same process would be interesting to implement on a larger scale. I largely forgot about that little experiment until ...

Augmented Democracy - Intentional Capitalism | A continuum analysis of collective decision making — tldr; democracy is our ideal. money is a convenient voting system but it has a glitch that breaks it irreversibly when too much is held by too few. therefore, we need wealth redistribution. I've been thinking about how groups make decisions. There are a lot of ways decision-making happens in detail, but I noticed a broad pattern that I wanted to discuss in this post: that the most fundamental component of a decision-making system boils down to how the atomic "decision making unit" (DMU) is distributed across the population. I'll ...

a.ttent.io/n — "Out early for drugs and octopus," Ezzy texted. She was sitting on the hallway floor of the Institute's distribution center, head leaning back against the wall. Three seconds after 6 AM she started tapping impatiently on the glass between her and the narcotics cabinet. She handed the requisition to the half-awake clerk, and he pushed the bottles across the counter with a detached shrug. She dropped the bottles into her backpack and slipped down the stairwell to the supply tunnel that ran under campus to the marine center. She waited ...

analyzing a.ttent.io/n — Why do written works of fiction ever have to be finished? What if the story's growth was part of the story itself? My first real work of fiction is finished. But I wonder if my first real story is just beginning? What is a.ttent.io/n? While I've previously alluded to the story I've been writing, which has been in the works for more than 3 years, I've never directly covered what it's about on this site. It's a story, to be sure, but it's also meant to be an experiment. Writing ...