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Problem Gambling
Everyone hates paying for laundry. If you’re lucky, it works like an old-school vending machine, where you feed in your card and it spits it back out and you’re ready to wash. If you’re not, you have to deal with getting rolls of quarters from the bank to feed into a coin drop that only… — read more
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Deep-Space Prehistory
As part of a project I have been doing research for, I recently did a bit of reading into the Toba catastrophe hypothesis. The theory goes that, at one point, the human population was fairly large and spread out into several parts of Eurasia, but then the eruption of the Toba supervolcano 74,000 years ago… — read more
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World-City Biomass
Did you know that there is less biomass of human being in the world than there is biomass of virus? I found this fact a bit unintuitive when I read it, but it does make sense on further consideration. According to a paper released by PNAS, there is about 0.06 gigatons (Gt) of carbon in… — read more
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Transhumanism is Occultism
Recently, I have been taking the time to study a variety of occult movements, and I have been struck by the similarity between occult literature and transhumanist theory. On some reflection, I believe that transhumanism can be classified as an occult system of belief. First, what does it mean for something to be an occult… — read more
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Rewilding – A Short Story
My boss got de-domesticated. It’s all bullshit, of course. Just alpha male marketing spin, like nootropics and boner pills, for guys who are insecure. I figured that I couldn’t judge too much, back then. I got my face chopped up in my teens, around the same time I got top surgery. We all do what… — read more
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Alternate Singularities
I’ve been thinking a little bit about the idea of the singularity, recently. It’s a common tech idea, dating back to at least the 80s. The general premise is that computers make research faster, which lets people make faster computers, which makes research faster, until the process starts automating itself with artificial intelligence and then… — read more
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The Holiday – A Short Story
My boss thought that the office needed a morale activity. I don’t know why, and I was in a bad mood after he told us that it was mandatory and that it was happening on Saturday. When he stood in the middle of the office and announced it, things got quiet for a bit,… — read more
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The Broadening of Cyberpunk
I recently read the 2023 novel The Blighted Stars by Megan E. O’Keefe, and I found it moderately enjoyable. It’s somewhere between a zombie horror story, a (very contemporary) romance novel, and a space opera, but it also has most of the characteristics of cyberpunk. So do a lot of novels, these days. In The… — read more
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The Economics of Mixed-Species Societies
Have you ever thought about the problems with doing business with an alien? A friend of mine recently watched the sequel to Zootopia, and he pointed out to me that the economics of Zootopia have to be very strange indeed. The movie is about animal people who all live together in one large metropolis, that… — read more
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Sci-Fi Fiat
I recently read Michael Z. Williamson’s The Weapon, which I discovered after finishing is actually the second book in a series of libertarian military science fiction stories. It had some very interesting elements but was overall fairly typical for that genre, and one thing that the author discussed was the economics of the world that… — read more
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J. E. Landau 