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"He hauled in a half-parsec of immaterial relatedness and began ineptly to experiment."
-James Tiptree Jr
November 25. The other night I had insomnia and it was the best thing ever. Just chilling in silent darkness, reveling in having nothing to do, feeling the glow of my body, it was so good I didn't want to fall asleep and miss it. I listened to the siren song of tinnitus and wished the night would never end. Now I'm wondering, did I just meditate?
Part Three of my new novel is up. I actually posted it three weeks ago but didn't announce it because it needed polishing, and if anyone read it early, yesterday I did a deep rewrite of the final section.
November 22. Stray links. Thanks Sam for this movie. She Is A Shaman is a slow-paced documentary about the lives of ayahuasca shamans in Peru, with great music. Just watching it inspires me to do things more slowly, but what I find most interesting is the wide range of technologies they use, from satellite TV to pounding roots with sticks. This is probably how it's going to be for the whole future of humanity, because there will always be some high tech around, but we're coming to the end of our ability to completely encase ourselves in the human-made world. By the way, the director of the movie is the girl from this video, the The "I Love You" Loop.
The Woman Who Defined the Great Depression. Sanora Babb grew up in rural poverty and was a good writer. She signed a contract to write a novel about the Dust Bowl, and to research it, she took a volunteer job resettling refugees and took hundreds of pages of notes. Her supervisor convinced her to turn the notes over to John Steinbeck, who used them to write The Grapes of Wrath, and then because that book already existed, nobody would publish her book.
Babb's work was largely antithetical to that of Steinbeck, and its "message" was a lot more complicated. While Steinbeck focused on the road trip carrying the Joads away from their already collapsed farmland, the entire first half of Babb's novel describes several years of the travails of the Dunne family, who struggle to grow broomcorn and wheat while their land grows increasingly parched, dust-storm-ridden and uninhabitable. In the second half of Babb's novel, the Dunnes don't simply submit to the California farm growers, or lose their temper, like Tom Joad, and flee, but bear down and become increasingly involved with labor organizers and strike actions.
Throw Out Your Black Plastic Spatula. It's probably made from toxic e-waste.
And more 2024 music, Des Demonas - The Duke Ellington Bridge. Their sound is hard to classify, but this particular song manages to sound like both The Velvet Underground and Camper Van Beethoven.
November 19. 
Just got back from Ireland. We picked it because it was cheap. Airfare and hotel for two weeks in Dublin was about the same as for five nights in Hawaii. A few notes.
Dublin is a very walkable city. In a half mile radius there are more good bookstores than in the entire Seattle metropolitan area. We went to all of them, and found some great books, including Listen to the Land Speak by Manchan Magan. I'm always looking for books about weird stuff, and Magan does a great job of making premodern manifestations accessible to mainstream readers. My favorite chapter is about Hy Brasail, an island now considered completely mythical, but it once appeared on respectable maps, and reliable witnesses claimed to have landed there.
And in a bookstore heaped with unfiled books, Leigh Ann picked out a gem that's not even on AbeBooks, The Paranormal Explained by Sean O'Donnell. He explains it as "anti-memory", a framing of precognition that he claims is completely scientific. This is the kind of book I love. The guy is sort of a crackpot, but he's smart and curious, and has lots of tips for being more intuitive.
The best museum in Dublin, everyone agrees, is the Archaeology museum, which is free, and contains breathtaking prehistoric jewelry and some cool bog bodies. The best lesser known museum is 14 Henrietta Street, a fascinating guided tour through a building that started out as upper class and eventually became filthy tenements.
Everyone knows the Irish love Guinness, but I didn't know how much. If you go into a pub and see three Irishmen at a table with three drinks, it's more likely to be three pints of Guinness than all other possibilities combined. In America I drink red ale, but Irish red ale has not kept up and is pretty lame. But where American IPAs tend to hide mediocre beer behind loads of hops and alcohol, Irish IPAs are excellent, typically light and citrusy.
We tried a lot of restaurants, and the best was a Chinese small plates place called Bigfan. But it's expensive and hard to get into. The one we went back to was Forno 500, an Italian place with excellent pizzas and a perfect atmosphere. Also we spent three nights in the west of Ireland, and a great hidden gem in Galway is a Mayan tapas restaurant called Sangria.
November 15. Quick note on travel. It's amazing how it distorts time, and this is somewhat related to money. If you have a few thousand dollars, you can spend it on a month of routine living that feels like a week, or a week of travel that feels like a month. I'm sure there are ways to get the same effect for free.
Quick note on AI. I'm traveling without my laptop, and drafting posts on my phone, which suggests the next word. Occasionally it's better than the word I had in mind, so I'll use it.
AI will never replace human creativity, because creativity is less about the product and more about the experience of making choices. But it can help by giving us more stuff to choose from.
November 10. Just spent a couple hours hanging out with Shane, an Irish leftist. He says everyone he knows is happy that Trump won. Not that they like Trump, but that since he took over the Republican party, the Democrats are the standard bearers for terrible American foreign policy.
He also made an interesting point, that while no Trumpers would ever identify as Communist, they want something similar: for a centralized state to make sure there are lots of manufacturing jobs.
November 7, 2024. Columbus, on meeting the Arawaks, famously wrote that they were such saps that "with fifty men we could subjugate them all." That must be how Trump feels right now. While the Dems are trying really hard and failing, he's like, I can't believe how easy it is to rule these soft and guileless people.
Trump is on a different karmic level. I don't mean that metaphorically, nor do I mean the popular concept of karma as a metaphysical enforcer of our own ideas about reward and punishment. Karma is an alien amoral system loosely related to human morality, with levels we do not understand. I don't know how one person can play life on single player cheat mode, while other players have to share the same world, but that's what it looks like.
Trump is Voldemort, and there is no Harry Potter, only a wide variety of Muggles including two unfortunate categories: Muggles who don't know that magic is real, and Muggles who seek power over others by allying themselves with a powerful wizard who doesn't care about them.
Of all the weird things that Trump's followers believe, the weirdest is that he will keep them safe. Sure, now they're safe from nonexistent dog eating immigrants. But it's the Dems who are so desperately safe that they are fatally un-fun, while Trump is clearly bringing the Apocalypse.
I wouldn't take that myth too literally, but I expect something recognizably similar, and I keep thinking of the Neil Young line: Look around while the clown who is sick does the trick of disaster.
November 1. I'll be traveling for the next two weeks and posting lightly. This is one of the best songs of 2024, and fitting: Sam Abbo - Doomsday
October 30. I voted for Kamala Harris, but I feel like Willy Wonka saying, no, stop, to the bad kids. I must express my disapproval of this tragic and hilarious thing that must happen. Here's one more attempt to explain it:
My D&D Character's Endorsement of Donald Trump
I, Menkalinan the wizard, fell with my party into a strange world. The people are mopey and neurotic, their eyes fixed on a mesmerizing oculus that has the whole population entranced. In this land of miracles, they spend their days in dreary toil, afraid of losing their navel-staring marvels.
The anti-magic field here is so strong that none of my spells work except simple divinations and summonings that never happened. Our ranger finds the land too denuded for even expert foraging. Our barbarian was arrested for public drunkenness and had his battle axe confiscated by a dull bureaucracy. And worst off is our cleric -- her god is dead.
In a pinch, she has turned to the Trickster, whose incarnation, called Trump, promises to upend institutions and shake the people out of their torpor. It is no easy road. Many will suffer acutely, who now only suffer chronically. But we pray that Trump will bookend this sorry age, and bring a new age of magic, so that we can open a portal and get back to Faltramador.
October 28. Back to politics, this election is really frustrating for rational people, because Trump's flaws are obvious, they're exactly what his opponents say they are, while the flaws of the Democratic party are so subtle that it's hard to say why they're losing. The best I can explain it is that the Democrats have obsolete propaganda. In 90 years they have not changed their way of framing economic issues.
I'd like Biden to stand up and say, "My fellow Americans, the state of the union is bad. We live in a declining empire at the twilight of the age of growth, and there's nothing we can do about it. We've been infantilized by social media, we no longer have the skill base to maintain the infrastructure, and we're all going to get poorer except the top tenth of one percent, who pull all the strings including mine. That's why we need boring and competent leadership to keep things from going to absolute shit."
They can't say that because they've dug themselves too deep in the hole of bland optimism. I fully expect Trump to win, if not this year then in 2028, because he has already shown the power to cheat death, and even full-on dementia will not change the reasons people are voting for him. What we have to understand about these times is that there will be no relief.
October 24. I don't feel like posting this week. Here's a classic Reddit comment about science and psychedelics.
We now have our most brilliant minds shackled to an ideology every bit as blinding as the old religious view of Catholicism. "It's all chance" is the "God works in mysterious ways" of our time. It is a fiction perpetrated by an institution invested in a certain way of seeing the world.
October 21. Political links. From 2013, a Reddit comment on the word homeland:
It's hard to explain how weird the word "Homeland" sounds in the ear of a pre-911 American. I can only say that it's not an American word. It's an Old World word.... It's a word used by a besieged, defensive and frightened people; not a word used by a confident, optimistic, powerful people. It's a word for serfs.
From 2017, in simple language, What Is Fascism? A Detailed Guide to a Dangerous Philosophy:
Under the pressures of real economic hardship, the fascist believes the problem can be solved by getting rid of of some undesirable group.... Violence from the bottom up is never to be tolerated. Violence from the top down is seen as equivalent to justice.
From 2019, Could American Evangelicals Spot the Antichrist? It's funny, the people who believe in the Antichrist are almost all under Trump's spell. But a few aren't, and this guy has written an impressive comparison of Bible passages and stuff Trump has done.
I don't believe in the Antichrist, but I believe in meaningful coincidences, in the intelligence of chance, and in the Trickster archetype, of whom Trump is an obvious and powerful incarnation. Related, a thread from the Spirituality subreddit, Could Trump actually be the catalyst that awakened masses?
He is an incredibly accurate and complete representation of America's collective shadow. Of course Americans are recoiling in horror, that's what people do when faced with their own shadow.... You don't put your shadow in charge. You accept it, because the suppression and denigration of those traits is specifically what creates the shadow in the first place.
October 17. Fun links. A study in Japan suggests that video games are good for your mental health
YouTube video about a jigsaw puzzle with two distinct solutions
Psychedelic Mushrooms Are Getting Much, Much Stronger
Mysterious gooey blobs washed up on Canada beaches baffle experts (thanks Gryphon). So far we don't even know if the origin is industrial or biological.
And some cool answers to this open-ended question on the Sprituality subreddit, What have you witnessed?
October 15. Part two of my new novel is up. Somewhere I read that a novelist doesn't really know how to write until their fifth novel. After seven years of steady fiction writing, I understand why Witches of the Pinspecked Void never found an audience. My worldbuilding was extremely ambitious, and my clunky exposition did not have nearly the bandwidth to wrap the reader's head around that world.
Exposition is 1) what you tell the reader, 2) when you tell them, and 3) how you tell them. It's basically writing. The most obvious way is usually wrong, and doing it right requires grinding through a lot of choices and developing an intutitive sense for what to say next.
Anyway, in part two, my protagonist leaves town and has some adventures in what is now eastern Washington, one or two thousand years in the future. The name Itchywanna is based on Nch'i-Wana, an indigenous name for the middle Columbia River.
October 14. Today's subject is health. Last month I learned, from this reddit thread, that the human body is really bad at storing water. One comment:
My understanding is that the control system for deciding when to send the water to urine and the control system for whether the parts of your body needs water were put together by different contractors who didn't talk to each other. As a consequence your kidneys can be busily shoving out water to your bladder while your organs are crying out for water.
Since then I've been self-experimenting. My habit for decades has been to wait until I'm obviously thirsty and then drink about ten swallows. So I started limiting it to three swallows, and overall I did not feel more thirsty. Then I tried one swallow every three minutes, for thirty minutes, and it was much more thirst quenching than ten swallows all at once.
You can do your own experiments. More generally, part of getting older and not dying is to give increasing attention to your body. Supposedly young people are physical and old people are mental, but for me it's been the opposite, because when I was young I could afford to ignore everything but my thoughts, and now I can't.
October 11. One more quote on the theme of the human-made world being less alive than the world outside it. This is from one of the letters of H.P. Lovecraft, after he explored a part of Manhattan that had not yet been turned into a grid street pattern.
What awesome images are suggested by the existence of such secret cities within cities! Beholding this ingulph'd and search-defying fragment of yesterday, the active imagination conjures up endless weird possibilities - ancient and unremember'd towns still living in decay, swallow'd up by the stern business blocks that weary the superficial eye, and sometimes sending forth at twilight strains of ghostly music for whose source the modern city-dwellers seek in vain. Having seen this thing, one cannot look at an ordinary crowded street without wondering what surviving marvels may lurk unsuspected behind the prim and monotonous blocks.
October 9. Years ago someone recommended the book The Perception of the Environment by Tim Ingold. Since then I've been reading it sporadically, and I'm still only a fifth of the way through. It's a large book with small print, and dense dense dense -- not hard to read, but full of ideas that take mental effort to integrate.
Ingold is an anthropologist, and a theme that keeps coming up is something I first encountered in Jerry Mander's book In The Absence of the Sacred: that what we see as human mastery or transcendence of nature, is better seen as humans getting deeper and deeper into our own little world. This is from chapter five, and it's basically the same as Monday's quote about AI:
Dogon cosmology envisages a kind of entropic system in which the maintenance of the village depends upon a continual inflow of vital force from the bush, which is worn down and used up in the process. If the village is a place of stability, where things stay put and proper distinctions are maintained, it is also a place of stagnation. In an almost exact inversion of the modern Western notion of food production as the manifestation of human knowledge and power over nature, here it is nature -- in the form of the bush -- that holds ultimate power over human life, while the cutivated fields and gardens are sites of consumption rather than production, where vital force is used up.
October 7. Picking up from a week ago, America Is Lying to Itself About the Cost of Disasters. "This mismatch, between catastrophes the government has budgeted for and the actual toll of overlapping or supersize disasters, keeps happening."
Related: How Soon Might the Atlantic Ocean Break?
The AMOC transports a staggering amount of energy. Like a million nuclear power plants. It is such a core element of the Earth system that its collapse would radically alter regional weather patterns, the water cycle, the ability of every country to provide food for its inhabitants.
New subject, sort of. This long Hacker News thread has lots of debates about how well AI is going to work. The popular fear is that it's going to work too well, but I lean toward the opposite position, explained in this comment:
At the root of all these technological promises lies a perpetual motion machine. They're all selling the reversal of thermodynamics.
Any system complex enough to be useful has to be embedded in an ever more complex system. The age of mobile phone internet rests on the shoulders of an immense and enormously complex supply chain.
LLMs are capturing low entropy from data online and distilling it for you while producing a shitton of entropy on the backend. All the water and energy dissipated at data centers, all the supply chains involved in building GPUs at the rate we are building. There will be no magical moment when it's gonna yield more low entropy than what we put in on the other side as training data, electricity and clean water.
When companies sell ideas like 'AGI' or 'self driving cars' they are essentially promising you can do away with the complexity surrounding a complex solution. They are promising they can deliver low entropy on a tap without paying for it in increased entropy elsewhere. It's physically impossible.
October 4. Music for the weekend. I've finished testing a new playlist, One Song Per Year, 1964-2024. It's not exactly my favorite song for each year, because I subbed out some songs that are not on Spotify, and a few times I put in a softer song for smoother transitions.
Also, in honor of Kris Kristofferson, who died last weekend, this is Johnny Cash's cover of Sunday Morning Coming Down.
October 3. Negative links! From Cory Doctorow, There's no such thing as shareholder supremacy. Supposedly corporations have an obligation to increase profits for shareholders, but that rule is unfalsifiable, because CEOs can do anything they want and claim it's for the shareholders.
Mississippi Town Ran Debtors Prisons. I used to think that small systems are automatically better than big systems, but right now there are a lot of small towns in America that are extremely corrupt, and this will get worse as the federal government gets weaker and less able to intervene.
The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age. It's about creative work, which is most satisfying if you're only trying to please yourself, if you're in an "off duty" and not an "at-job" mental state. But now it's getting difficult to stay in that mental state, with so many temptations to measure your success with online stats.
Pro bettors are disguising themselves as gambling addicts. A comment from the Hacker News thread says it all: "The fact that people good at gambling have to pretend to be addicted money losers in order to not get kicked off platforms tells you how predatory these platforms are."
An Ask Reddit thread full of stories about the psychology of power: Women who left a rich guy, why did you do it?
Finally, a positive link from Ask Old People, What qualities of today's youth do you like?
September 30. Continuing on doom, Matt comments:
When it comes to climate change and collapse, I think it's just that hard crashes (for Americans) will happen in poor states and far-flung places. For example, whole communities in Louisiana are still recovering from hurricanes in the past few years and it's not big news. Homes are being abandoned or lived in despite not passing inspection. I think that sort of thing will become more frequent, and for the people in those places it will be a hard crash. They'll have to pick up and move.
I predict that if we don't radically reorganize in the US then a day will come when FEMA is largely incapable of responding to, say, a Fort Myers/Hurricane Ian event. I say that based on the fact that billion-dollar disasters have been on the rise. At some point, we won't be able cover a new one because we're still responding to the last one. The fallout will always be unequal, with rich people fleeing ahead and poor people being managed in (eventually) UN Disaster Camps.
This is my new way of framing collapse: 1) Dumb history will blame it on the biggest most obvious thing, just like the fall of Rome is blamed on barbarians. 2) Smart history will understand that a robust system could have dealt with that thing, but that the system was already declining for many complex reasons. 3) The propaganda of collapsing systems will continue to insist that they're strong, while basing that statement on a decreasing range of regions and people.
4) Many individuals, maybe even a majority, will personally experience a catastrophic event, in their local area or their personal life, from which they do not recover, and for which the state and the economy have no remedy. There is no practical difference between "the system is no longer doing anything for me" and "the system no longer exists."
So paradoxically, the objective story will be a gradual decline, while the two most common subjective stories will be a hard crash, and everything is fine.
September 26. Today's subject, doom. Of the many threats facing global complex society, I think climate change is overrated. It's going to be a long series of local catastrophes that will mainly challenge public institutions through the pressure of refugees.
A bigger threat is infrastructure decay, for example, One Quarter of America's Bridges May Collapse Within 26 Years. Combine this with loss of skills, and increasing technological complexity, and it's an easy prediction that a lot of stuff that now works is going to stop working, unless you have a lot of money. More examples in this Reddit thread, What's a thing that is dangerously close to collapse?
And the biggest threat is that the economy as we know it, and a large part of the meaning of life, depends on perpetual growth, which is now ending. Capitalism will continue to hide it by defining "growth" by increasingly vaporous things, like they've already been doing by shifting the Dow Jones from industrial stocks to tech stocks. They might have such clever numbers that they won't understand why all the workers are angry and unmotivated.
One aspect of the end of growth that I haven't seen mentioned, is investment. Right now, you can just stick your money anywhere and it will automatically grow. But it's getting harder to stay ahead of inflation, and at some point, investment will become a crapshoot.
Back in July I wrote that "historians will look back and see us right now inside the date range of a relatively fast crash." But it's more interesting to imagine how that prediction could be wrong. The most likely way is if there's some big event that hasn't happened yet: a nuclear war, a deadlier pandemic, a very big earthquake, or a solar flare that fries a bunch of satellites.
Hard mode: What it would take for the system to adapt so smoothly that future historians don't even see a crash? I don't think we can do it without an unconditional basic income, and I think the Republican party will get on board with a UBI, when they realize what all that money, percolating up through the economy, can do for churches.