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While I Rock

My favorite example of a literary translation error begins in the year 2000.

The primary theme of Scavengers Reign is right there in plain sight. I think it’s trying to reckon with how we face the overwhelming power of the natural world and its implacable indifference to the individual organisms that make it up.

The Infinite Library

With the launch of GPTs, OpenAI is letting anyone with a ChatGPT Pro account create and share customized chatbots. The one I made is called The Infinite Library, and it lets you browse the cultural products of an alternate civilization.

Eroticism, Interiority, and AI Art

The conversation about recent advances in machine learning-driven image generation tools (I don’t like the term “AI art,” but it’s become ubiquitous, and I am caving to the weight of convention) has—like so many other topics in the churn of cultural discourse—quickly become weird. One of

The Neck Fantasy

For two years now my waking hours have been marked by persistent neck and shoulder pain. At its worst it was incapacitating and it made basic daily functioning nearly impossible; most days it is merely annoying, representing a measurable but surmountable increase in the volume of the mental static I

Deinocheirus Revisited

It’s funny what sticks in your mind. As a kid I had the standard kid-type obsession with dinosaurs. Having an obsession with dinosaurs is great, or at least it was great in my case, because it mostly manifested itself as a desire to read every dinosaur book on which

The Perfect Thing

I have a few vices. I sleep in. I buy drug store candy and eat it, in volume, at my desk. I put too much cream and sugar in my coffee. I enjoy dirty comic books. But by far my most long-standing and financially deleterious vice is my love of gadgets.

Redesigning the Sockdolager

I have the privilege of maintaining the archives for The Sockdolager, an online zine of speculative fiction. Although the zine is currently on publishing hiatus, I feel very strongly about keeping the lights on for the authors who'd done me the honor of letting me publish their work. As convenient

Jack in Texas

I was 11 or 12 for sure; definitely no older than 13.

On Target

Upon the metaphorical road's failure to rise up to meet me, I was forced to take a job in Shitty Retail, working the 0400-1200 logistics shift at a Target store in Cheyenne, WY, USA. It was there under the threateningly, vertiginously expansive skies that I learned the way of the world.

Away

January 2023

Why Not Mars ◼︎

Maciej Cegłowski has made a persuasive case against human boots on Mars in the foreseeable future. Not only am I convinced that he's right in specific case, but ever since reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora a few years ago, I've largely divorced myself from the romantic falsehood of galactic manifest destiny. Let's just build more telescopes and robots while we work on fixing up where we are always, always, always going to live.

September 2022

The (lonely, discouraging) Journey to Nanite ◼︎

While acknowledging that not everybody finds deeply technical discussions of things they only faintly understand to be compelling viewing, I found Brian Karis's 90-minute keynote address totally engrossing. He discusses his year-long intellectual journey towards what became Unreal Engine 5's virtualized geometry technology not in terms of the technical triumph that it ultimately was but rather the messy process of dead-ends, hunches, and lonely groping in the dark that it took to get there.

In his relating of the experience of working on a problem where a solution was far from guaranteed, Karis's humility and curiosity are genuinely inspirational.

August 2020

The Flying Train ◼︎

Shot in 1902, “The Flying Train” takes viewers on an uncommonly crisp journey aboard a suspended railcar. Throughout the two-minute video, riders see Wuppertal residents walking across pedestrian bridges and down dirt roadways more than a century ago. The city is known still today for its schwebebahn, which is a style of hanging railway that’s unique to Germany.

This led me to look up the Wikipedia article for Wuppertal Schwebebahn, which in addition to being a still-functioning hanging rail system over a century old, is—if I don't miss my guess—a double dactyl.