August, 2026

Aug 1

Convenience Creep began with the escalator. It ends with reality becoming the plot of the Pixar movie WALL-E.

Air-travel is slow teleportation. You have no experience of appraising a place, analogous to stepping into a chamber on the Enterprise and being beamed down to a planet of which you have only ever seen pictures.

Aug 2

To itch but not to scratch—that is enlightenment.

Is the correct idiom “white for harvest” rather than “ripe for harvest,” as in “the fields are white for harvest” (John 4:16:35, ESV)? In Beneath the Glacier, I used “ripe,” and now that’s going to eat at me. I mean, both phrases make sense—actually “ripe . . .” Is more intuitive—but, prescriptively speaking, it may be a usage error.

Aug 3

This is the exact reason why nihilism is untenable: the statement that there is nothing of meaning is it self a value-judgement. The perpetrator of nihilism exercises the divine human faculty of meaning-making but chooses to force the issue in the opposite direction.

If I were to write any freelance articles in the gaming industry, I would want to work with publications like these, who covers news but also publish more timeless articles about gaming broadly and revisit games from new angles, like narrative, mechanics, etc. (Basically, just not IGN.)

• Aftermath, worker-owed and reader-supported
• Rock Paper Shotgun, PC-focused
• Giantbomb
• Polygon
• GameInfomer

If I were to write about games, I would want to focus on narrative, the writing, and how well the story was integrated into the video-game medium. I saw a review about Firewatch that complained it wasn’t repayable. Why does every game need to be repayable?! Why is that a default category denoting quality? I will remember that game forever, regardless of whether I replay it, and I finished it within a week, over I think three or four sittings, in six hours. It was like a film but better. I would want to write about games like Firewatch and Outer Wilds and Celeste and nerd out about specific design decisions and game-mechanics like the little animation Kirby has when he lands in Forgotten Lands where he bounces and does a little flip when you fall from a certain height. If I wrote about games, I would want to seek out and celebrate the absolute best that gaming has to offer, rather than pose as a critic as if my opinion matters more than the next gamer’s.

Maybe I could get some freelance editing work for gaming publications, as I work up to contract roles with gaming studios for narrative design.

Aug 4

Explaining Colons and Semicolons Using Office-Supply Analogies

Colons, as in Python’s dictionaries, join key–value pairs. They do not separate related commands or code blocks within a method; that job is for the semicolon.

Here is an ambiguous case. Should these clauses be connected by a colon or semicolon?

At the precipice of the coaster’s initial dropped, I screamed with everyone else [: / ;] my body floated up off the seat.

Answer: Semicolon—independent clause with its own subject, does not indicate anything about the first clause, only expands upon it

At the precipice of the coaster’s initial drop, I did what no one else seemed likewise compelled to do [: / ;] scream.

Answer: Colon—answers the question posed by the first clause, which is critically a complete clause on its own, then clarified by the second clause, which is a fragment.

Note: either clause, before or after a colon, can be incomplete as long as one clause in the sentence is independent, to avoid fragments.

The colon unfolds, whereas the semicolon stacks. Think of the colon as revealing the contents of the first clause, like removing the pen cap to examine the pen-head: Is it a ball-point or fountain? Think of the semicolon as a laminate sleeve you’d use to store documents in a binder; the sleeve unites two otherwise discrete pages into one unit: recto and verso.

Aug 5

New pre-wedding mantra, in anticipation of our honeymoon, which I suddenly blurted out as we were headed out the door to the airport for yet another flight:

“All roads lead to Greece, where stress goes to die.”

I have these three labels for the three acts of story that apply to a traditional hero’s journey regardless of the story’s content. It’s a framework to layer on top of something like Campbell’s twelve-step Hero’s Journey or Dan Harmon’s eight-step Story Circle.

Act I: Out of the Light Act II: Into the Dark Act III: Into the Light

Out of the Light means “away from the known.” Into the dark means “into the unknown.” Into the Light means “through the unknown to something new, now known.”

Aug 6

Final ToC for BtG:

Prologue: The Nectar Is in the Knothole

I: Hubris

• A Different Eagle
• The Eagle’s Landing

II. Humility

• Her Body Simply Being
• Beneath Snæfellsjökull
• False Summits

III. Faith

• Setting Sail Sans Passport
• My Debts to the Ferrymen

IV. Wisdom

• A Taste of Perfect Sweetness
• Autonomy & Monogamy
• Two Binary Stars

V. Harmony

• Dormant, Dreaming
• The Sun Also Sets

Epilogue: Feeling Fire & Ice

On the Felt Length of Syllables

Is there a category that further divides syllables, between the syllable and the phonetic sound, a classification of syllables that denotes some as long and some as short? I think I’ve come across it before but can’t recall.

Take The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as an example. Lion and wardrobe are both two syllables, but wardrobe feels like a longer word. It not only has more letters but more total sounds per syllable. The vowels in both ward- and -robe are bookended by consonants, whereas lion only has two consonants in total. Both words can be uttered within the same quarter-second, yet wardrobe requires more mouth-fuel: i.e., oxygen internally combusted into CO2, that moves the muscles of the tongue and lips and throat and moves air through the system.

Consonant-dense words feel and sound longer than more sparsely consonant-ed counterparts of equal syllables. Consonants are denser, more chewy; it’s harder to speak when your mouth is full of them.

Why does this matter? It’s yet another quality that affects rhythm, rhyme, and meter in both prose and poetry. It’s not enough to count syllables per line, or per clause. Those syllables must also be weighed and arranged such that the reader’s mouth or his mind’s ear does not become fatigued by too many consonants per syllable.

New addition to my list of favorite words:

Consonants, the plural of the noun referring to the letters corresponding to non-vowel sounds in language, for itself being one of the most consonant-dense words in the English language. Find me another three-syllable word that is this chewy: con-so-nants.

Did Buddha Consider Suicide?

A simple thought-experiment as an argument against suicide:

Siddhartha, the Buddha, is so dubbed during life: “the awakened one,” enlightened. It is clear to himself and to all his followers that he has escaped the cycle of Samsara and will pass on to non-dual existence, Nirvana, after death.

If the world of Samsara is so terrible and Nirvana an escape from the suffering inherent in existence, then why wait around for death? Why shouldn’t the Buddha go ahead and kill himself so that he can get out earlier, reach his goal sooner, why delay eternity? And worse—what if his sound mind won’t last, what if his enlightened state isn’t permanent or guaranteed? What if he waits around on Earth for another decade to help and heal others only to fall out of peace and die in that state, which death thrusts him back into the Samsaric cycle of birth and death?

Why does the Buddha, after becoming enlightened in life, not kill himself? No enlightened being desires death; he does not long for an escape from the life—from its joys and pains. For if he did, he would not be enlightened.

Why does the man, after becoming broken by life, not kill himself? Every spirit knows its strength of will, even if its fleeting mind and body oft forget. The spirit, like the Buddha, knows that no pain is permanent.

The archetypes, idioms, metaphors, and personas associated with death so often evoke the cold, ice, freezing, because the primary characteristic of the frozen and the dead is the same: the cessation of change. Death is the absence of change, whereas change is the only constant in life.

Aug 7

Why is short hair masculine and long hair feminine? Because short hair is yang, and long hair is yin. Short hair does not encumber; it liberates, yet it is only functional and limits expression and style. Long hair is encumbering but only the way roots encumber a tree; long hair is grounding, protective, an opportunity for expression and, when desired and left down, a veil of safety: a cloak concealing a sorceress or cape adorning a hero. Short hair facilitates ambition (the masculine energy, yang). Long hair facilitates mystery (the feminine energy, yin).

A military-man’s flat-top is like lichen on a rock. Still the rock is adorned with something soft and organic, but the overwhelming majority of the composition is rough, rigid, impenetrable. And a Native American maiden’s hip-length black locks are like the roots of a sycamore, demonstrating her power and wisdom while both adorning and concealing her body.

A man cuts his hair to prepare for something, whether war or a wedding or next week’s work trip. A woman cuts her hair to rid herself of something she is carrying. Of course, either a man or woman could cut their hair for either reason, but one is clearly masculine, yang: practical, future-focused; and the other is clearly feminine, yin: past-integrating, emotionally charged.

Note: This thought was inspired by the couple in front of me on the tarmac in CLT who both had full and healthy heads of hair, yet the mans was as short as you could go without it being buzzed, and the woman’s dark brunette hair was some of the longest and fullest hair I’ve ever seen—a striking volume with no extensions, all natural. It spread across her whole back and its ends landed below her waist, above her hips. It was the first time I had looked at someone and whether her hair follicles and scalp muscles and neck muscles ever got fatigued from carrying hair around, whether putting her hair up had a similar effect as a busty woman putting on a bra.

On Lazy Cinematography

I’ve been glancing across the aisle of this plane at a woman’s iPad. She’s watching a show (title-card just flashed up for a new episode: Sweet Magnolias) that abuses over-the-shoulder shots—but not only that; the jarring part is the hard, quick cuts between the two OTS shots in dialogue scenes. The fist one I noticed, in the last episode, was between a husband and wife on the stairs in their home, which was especially disorienting, moving up and down the stairs and behind one character each time the other spoke. Then, the next episode began with a similarly-shot dialogue-scene set on a couch between a mother and daughter. Do cinematographers and cinephiles complain about this? It’s pretty ridiculous. Why so ridiculous? Well . . .

First, it treats the viewer like a baby, cutting to keep me entertained when characters are stationary and changing angles to indicate who is speaking as if I couldn’t figure that out from maybe their voices or body movement or the fact that I can see their mouth moving. So, it assumes I can’t sit still and pay attention. And this cinematographic style removes the necessity for the writing to be engaging on its own, as is morally true for any long stretch of dialogue (which is what those scenes are hard to write, in a screenplay or otherwise).

Then, the fast cuts and perspective-shifts that are meant to keep me entertained and clarify what’s happening are, in fact, confusing and disorienting. I don’t get to see how one actor is physically responding while the other is talking. I don’t really know with whom I am meant to empathize, root for, or relate, since I am assuming both characters’ perspectives equally. I have less information than I’d like and no indication as to what is important, what to focus on, besides to focus on the words that are being spoken, which I would do already. It’s simultaneously an abuse of the medium of film and a waste of it. The characters are stationary—talking heads—so the camera moves around to make it visually stimulating, but there is hardly any visual information communicated, only the audio, the words, the script.

Lastly, there’s the totally suspension-of-disbelief-shattering, uncanny quality of flickering between two camera angles and not seeing a camera where it should be. These schizophrenic OTS scenes remind the viewer that they are watching a show, at least me, because I start thinking about how what I’m watching is at least two takes spliced together, how it could not possibly be one continuous conversation—as it appears in the edit—because there would be a camera visible behind each actor in every OTS shot. Instead of listening to the dialogue, which the writers may have succeeded in making engaging and relatable and economic, I become distracted by these meta-thoughts about where that camera went, how many takes this took, etc.

This style is analogous to dialogue in prose that does not interweave any interiority or action and just snaps back and forth between dialogue snippets, all tagged with “Susan said,” then “said Mike” and so on—which is about the worst sin you can make when writing dialogue!

The antithesis to this style is a wider shot, showing everyone involved in the conversation. Maybe it’s a stationary camera with a pan or zoom to add some movement to the scene, or maybe the camera tracks, and the characters work through creative blocking to create different compositions within one shot, to fill out the scene and add visual dynamism to the conversation. Hardly anyone every talks sitting or standing still.

I’m think of that brilliant, climactic scene of Past Lives in the bar where the three of them are talking, and the woman in the middle of her childhood love and her husband. The camera is across the bar, the composition centered on her, and it slowly zooms. We see her looking between her two men, getting sucked into the conversation with her childhood friend from Korea, and as the frame tightens up, it tightens on the two of them, as the woman stops translating to the husband. Suddenly, it swaps to OTS shots that are limited to the woman and the Korean man, as they speak to each other in Korean. It’s such an effective and memorable choice that reinforces the character- and plot-progression in the scene. And then, as soon as you start to wonder how her husband is reacting, it cuts back out to a wide shot of the three of them, highlighting his body language and facial expression. He doesn’t say a word, yet his experience is folded into the scene anew, and we feel for him, all while the conversation in Korean continues, and we never lose sight of the action (their dialogue is never “voiceover”).

Unconditional Gift-Giving

Gifting in its purest form is providing or creating something for someone without an expectation for anything in return. This is unconditional gift-giving, which is remarkably rare, almost only ever occurring between family members. To give a gift with any expectation is to, instead, slough off one’s burden onto another person. The most pernicious causes of conditional gifting are all of the events and occasion that we have decided require gifts. Gifts and obligation do not mix, yet they almost always do.

Aug 8

I believe this is the reading I have chosen for my wedding. It is the truest thing I’ve ever encountered about marriage, rare evidence in the vast writings about love of what a co-creative, rather than a co-dependent, partnership can be:

It is a question in marriage, to my feeling, not of creating a quick community of spirit by tearing down and destroying all boundaries, but rather a good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude, and shows him this confidence, the greatest in his power to bestow. A togetherness between two people is an impossibility, and where it seems, nevertheless, to exist, it is a narrowing, a reciprocal agreement which robs either one party or both of his fullest freedom and development. But, once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky!

– Rilke, quoted in Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties

On Writing My Own Wedding Ceremony

I need to write an essay about how to write your own wedding ceremony and then offer a wedding-ceremony editing service for people who are bothered by the possessive and co-dependent language that pervades wedding ceremonies. As far as I can tell, it’s a “gap in the market,” and I think I could do a lot of good.

One thing to highlight in the essay is the fact that the Declaration of Intent is a promise the couple makes to the officiant, and that’s the traditional “to have and to hold” commitment. That’s crazy! The only commitment should be the vows, which the couple makes to one another. The Declaration of Intent should be a promise directed at the officiant to uphold and fulfill the commitment that you will make today (your vows).

Aug 10

A theme that emerged from the process of writing Beneath the Glacier:

Humility in the Anthropocene: How to relate to Nature in a harmonious way without forsaking man’s values and ambition.

Aug 11

A Toronto native told me today that one in five Canadians die by assisted suicide—and not just the elderly.

We just got into the air, leaving from Toronto to KEF, and Icelandair is handing out complimentary eclipse glasses, along with an announcement that it is the first time a total eclipse has been visible from Reykjavík since 1417 (or some year in that century). Love it.

Aug 12

The fruits of aimlessness are always ripe and ready, but they cannot be reached, only caught midair.

One can only attend to that which has already entered one’s awareness. If attention is sacred—and it is, because pure, focused attention is prayer (Simone Weil)—then one’s awareness-field is sacred because it determines to what and to whom one’s prayers are directed. Who inhabits your awareness-field? What portion are deities and what demons?

We’re going through a dense cloud-band on our descent—an uninterrupted gray for five minutes, until the sun flashes through for a moment like a strobe light through a channel of cloud diffuse enough for me to see it. It feels like a low-viz SCUBA-dive, if the surface were down. Finally, after seven minutes, the gray is starting to brighten, and now tinted green. Peering through the bottom sliver of the starboard-side window, I spot the familiar and unmistakable composition of color and texture: sprawling fields of basaltic lava-rock blanketed by Icelandic moss. We breach the surface not even a thousand feet from the ground; on the horizon, there are three discrete clusters of rain, water that the cloud-band’s surface-tension could no longer hold up.

Unfortunately, there is a ceiling in the sky in Iceland today, as there often is. Today, it means that the plasma-photons from the blotted-out sun’s corona might not even be able to break through.

There’s an hour-long partial eclipse in Reykjavík today before totality and another partial-hour afterwards. Totality lasts one minute, like reducing sap to syrup.

Notes from Totality in Reykjavík

• Many tiny raindrops on the ocean sound like static on a recorded line.
• Terns’ cries sound like pitched-up DJ scratches.
• There is a gray ceiling on the world today; everything is dimmed and dampened already.
• As the dimmer accelerates (and it accelerates—not constant), my stomach drops, and I involuntarily remove my hat, even in the rain, I guess as a plea to whatever gods are at play not to harm humble me.
• Midges that had been moving in coordinated strafing patterns along the shore start fracturing, individuals seeming to lose their bearings. I think I even saw one crash-land!
• Then the shadow oppresses us.
• Down the beach, a lone woman cheers, and another woman (seemingly the first’s friend) looses a laugh of discomfort, the sort of laugh you hear at a funeral. Then everyone is silent.
• Can a day get darker, at 5:48 p.m. in the Nordic summer? Indeed, it became darker still, the beach quieter still. I lost sight of the horizon and could only locate it by the blinks of a sailboat’s red mast-indicator light. I was otherwise completely disoriented: subtle vertigo. Both the ocean and the sky were a terrifying abyss-blue-black. If the moon were any larger at all, pigment would have left altogether, and black it all would have been, blind we all would have been. Displaced, abandoned on lava rocks.
• One man on a kayak, one on a paddleboard
• Even knowing what was happening and that it wouldn’t last, I felt fear. Fear and awe and gratitude. We all seemed to both want the sun to return and were grateful to have witnessed the moon’s show of her power. At least, that’s how I interpreted the applause.
• As fast as the shadow had hit us, the light hit us from the other side. I didn’t notice a direction on the dimming down (in my mind, I imagined the moon moving south to north), since we couldn’t track the bodies behind the clouds. But on the lighting up, it clearly came from north to south, and so the applause. Sound is already slower than light; then you have to account for the time it takes a human to recover from mild shock. Like a crowd’s wave at Kauffman Stadium, the applause made its way along the beach to us, then beyond us: Doppler effect, then the master dial dimming down. We were all relieved.
• At first I clapped for the sun’s return then retroactively attributed my applause to the moon for her great display. Again, fear briefly overriding gratitude and awe.
• Totality was nothing like nighttime.
• There was a dimmer, then a switch.
• The terns were the first to complain. They were distraught, like the rest of us, and then quickly perturbed by the dark: nearby, overlapping squawks of discontent in the dark.

Aug 14

Gullfoss: Infinite white stallions on perpetual stampede over hillocks unto death

Aug 15

Do not mistake connection for completion. There is no mate-shaped hole in your soul.

// There is no mate-shaped hole in your soul. Do not mistake connection for completion. Your soul is whole on its own.

Falljökull Glacier Hike

• Outlet/tongue of Vatnajökull ice-cap
• Ice is 150 m thick on the second plateau
• Lake/lagoon at the moraine is 60 meters deep
• Saw the aftermath of one ice-fall, then heard two more that we couldn’t see, all during one stop for drinking from a stream: three calves, very rare!
• Hiked to just below the serac field
• Glacier is so named because it is steep and precipitous, looks like it’s falling
• Guides: Thomas and Eric with Troll Tours. Talked with Eric: skier, climber, spends half his year here with girlfriend then the ski season in Japan with her, both guides/instructors. He wants to start his own climbing company in his home of Chamonix
• Gifted a signed copy of BtG to the crew

Aug 16

Iceland is a cathedral with vaulted fjord-walls, a cloud-ceiling, and lichen-carpet.

Aug 17

I’ve been saying and thinking that I don’t like marketing, but really, I don’t like advertising. I don’t like contributing to the deluge of “buy my book” posts on social media. The part of marketing I do like, and something I am good at, is sales. One to one, rather than one to many, selling myself and my book because it’s something I believe will benefit the person I’m talking to, not because I want random strangers’ money. So, I’m going to lean into this interest, this skill, to market Beneath the Glacier. I’ll bring it up to strangers I meet, as I’ve been doing in Iceland this week; I’ll cold-email people with large audiences, writers, readers, and authors; I’ll walk into local bookstores and slowly build a network of independent booksellers who anticipate Glacial Press’s next release.

Aug 18

Suicide is the most extreme symptom of the illusion of permanence. One antidote is to accept the reality that everything—even a great pain that seems never-ending—everything is impermanent, every sorrow and every joy.

Aug 19

Valleys are feminine; mountains, masculine.

Ref: Chapter 6 of the Tao Te Ching (“The valley spirit never dies. / Call it the mystery, the woman. . . .”)

Aug 20

Gilgamesh’s Humbaba is analogous to Mockingbird’s Boo Radley.

Skin is the confluence, the eddy-line, of the within and without: where the two rub and wriggle.

Sci-Fi Scope-Creep

I’m now the majority of the way through the live release of Silo Season 3, and it is suffering from the same curse as Westworld, just with one extra season (two rather than one) before a precipitous decline in quality and narrative structure and intrigue.

I deem this as a pitfall of the genre, most dangerous in the case of adaptations from books or short stories. Sci-fi creators are naturally plot-heavy thinkers, and I think they make the mistake that viewers care most about plot. They don’t; almost no one does. Certainly no one cares about the plot if they don’t care about the characters. Both Silo and Westworld do a good job establishing compelling plot and characters (and setting/world). For that reason, the first seasons of both shows are totally engrossing. But then comes the creep.

In sci-fi, the inciting incident is usually world-wide rather than character-specific. In Westworld, the premise is the invention of this debaucherous Disneyland, and the inciting incident is when one of the hosts begins remembering. In Silo, the premise is the creation of these underground silos, and societies for unknown reasons), and the inciting incident is Sherrif Holston’s going out.

Both of those events are discrete changes to the built world: hosts now remember; even the sheriff wants to go out. The issue is that they have nothing much to do with our main characters. In narratives like these, it’s almost as if the inciting incident, the narrative spark, is a new feature of the setting/world/landscape rather than a conflict that confronts the protagonist. And that makes for a big issue once the inciting-incident conflict is resolved, which is sure to happen within the first season. In Silo, for instance, the Holston conflict is resolved at the end of Season 1 when Juliet, the new sheriff, goes out and doesn’t clean.

After the series-starting incident is resolved, these shows risk making a dire error. They may try to manufacture another update to the world or setting rather than letting the inciting incident of the new narrative arc be about character. Thankful, Silo does not make this error until Season 3 (technically the epilogue to the Season 2 finale), with the introduction of the Washington D.C. “before-times” storyline. Season 2’s scope does increase, with the introduction of other silos, but the focus remains on our main characters, and the narrative engine is grounded in their hopes and wants and fears. You know structure is good when it’s simple: Will Juliet make it back from Silo 17 in time to save everyone she’s ever known?

Silo Season 3, unfortunately, makes the same error Westworld did by adding Shogun World and The Raj in their Season 2. The creators seem to think that I need an answer about the Before Times and a whole host of new characters (nearly double the number I already cared about and was rooting for) to remain interested. Rather, even just the abrupt shifts in color from the underground fray of the Silo to the sunny D.C. establishing shots are so jarring as to make me check out completely. They are wrong. I don’t care. I don’t need to know. Leave the question unanswered. Or, if you’re going to go there, do it in one or two episodes. The entire Holston arc is confined to the pilot alone, for God sakes! Not only does Silo Season 3 distract from the characters I care about with some slow-paced political soap opera (that, after seven episodes, has still not provided any answers) but also erased our protagonist from the narrative with the forgetting-drug, which is merely a narrative device to halt the progress of the Silo 18 people and pad out the season’s run-time. Rebecca Ferguson does her best, but that decision crippled the whole season: Silo without Juliet! I don’t want to watch Batman without Batman! Freaking ridiculous.

Okay, now I want to end this rant with a solution: how to prevent sci-fi scope-creep. The solution is, essentially, to separate premise from inciting incident, and to intertwine inciting incident with character. Severance does this very well.

The inciting incident of Season 1 is Helly R.‘s arrival to MDR, coinciding with Mark, our protagonist, becoming manager. Critically, this event, this inciting incident, is independent of the sci-fi premise about Lumon and severance and all. This event matters because: (1) Mark’s first task as manager is to onboard Helly, and (2) Helly upsets innie-Mark’s established world by making him question things he hadn’t before. And he’s attracted to her. That’s plenty to work with for a story as is, and—again—that’s before you layer on the mysteries of Lumon, outtie-Mark’s life and motivations for getting severed, etc. Severance Season 1 starts with Helly R. insisting on going outside. Season 1 ends with the entire MDR team successfully “booting up” inside their outies’ bodies, thus resolving the “Helly R. arc.” We start with her as Helly R. on the table. We end with her as Helena Eagan on stage.

Then, Season 2 successfully avoids scope-creep (honestly at the risk of not expanding the world enough, causing some viewers to wish the mystery would be solved faster) with innie-Mark’s discovery that Ms. Casey is Gemma. So, the first season’s conflict is centered on the Mark–Helly relationship, and the second season’s on the Mark–Gemma relationship. Or, to put it another way: Season 1 is about Helly’s escape and Season 2 is about Gemma’s escape. None of that has to do with the scope of the world or the rules of it or the conditions of it. Actually, the whole Lumon system is set in stone long before the series even starts, and we just get plopped into the mystery with them. That is the way to write serialized sci-fi. Set the conditions of the world as the premise, then let the characters do all the narrative work. Especially, make sure that the primary narrative conflict is inside one character rather than world-wide.

Aug 21

Shopping Translations of the Tao Te Ching

My “mission statement” for my Tao Te Ching project:

“Create my own English translation as a collage of the best parts from five existing and well-regarded English translations, with as little interpretation and augmentation as possible, while also exercising my liberty to substitute words I deem more apt for the meaning.”

So far, I have selected three translations and have worked with them through the first 11 chapters, and I want to find two more highly regarded English translations that I can reference. Here are the three I am referencing already:

• Ursula K. Le Guin’s
• Stephen Mitchell’s
• Stephen Addiss & Stanley Lombardo

I would like for these final two to be translations from the original Chinese rather than adaptations/paraphrases/interpretations like Mitchell’s and Le Guin’s.

I want these five to be as varied as possible. Right now, I have Le Guin’s as the most figurative and feminine, but also sparse and monosyllabic, whereas Mitchell’s is most like contemporary Western prose, and the Lombardo translation is the closest to poetry. These final two versions need to differ enough from the other three to offer something new and interesting, another variable to the equation I aim to solve.

One I’m considering is Jonathan Star’s translation for Teacher Cornerstone Editions, which seems like it falls right in the middle: not a sinologist or a Western literary interpreter, more like a direct translation. It might be nice to have him in the middle, and then two of each of the “interpretive” and “academic” translations. The Addiss & Lombardo translation is academic and derived from the Chinese directly. So, if I add Star’s I would only need one more “academic” one, likely either D.C. Lau’s (1963/89), Arthur Waley’s (1934), or Red Pine’s (1996).

Right, now, there may actually be five categories here, rather than just the three buckets of “interpretive,” “academic,” and “mix.” Maybe it’s more like a 2x2 matrix of literal to figurative on the X-axis and faithful to interpretive on the Y axis. And I want one in all four quadrants as well as one that falls near the origin.

I found an online version of Waley’s, and after reading a few chapters, I love it. I think it offers something that the others don’t: complex sentence structure and varied rhythm like Western philosophy while retaining the poetic imagery of the Chinese. Here’s his chapter 10, for instance:

Can you keep the unquiet physical-soul from straying, Hold fast to the Unity, and never quit it? Can you, when concentrating your breath, Make it soft like that of a little child? Can you wipe and cleanse your vision of the Mystery till all is without blur? Can you love the people and rule the land, Yet remain unknown? Can you in opening and shutting the heavenly gates play always the female part? Can your mind penetrate every corner of the land, But you yourself never interfere? Rear them, then, feed them, Rear them, but do not lay claim to them. Control them, but never lean upon them; Be chief among them, but do not manage them. This is called the Mysterious Power.

Okay, so I now have my final five, plotted along the matrix. But first, I want to make one change to it. Rather than “figurative” vs. “literal,” I want to say “poetic” vs. “philosophical.” And instead of “academic” vs. “interpretive,” it’s really “Chinese-derived” and “English-derived.” Or, in other words, “translation” and “interpretation.” Thus, here are the final five:

• Poetic Interpretation: Ursula K. Le Guin’s
• Philosophical Interpretation: Stephen Mitchell’s
• Centrist: Jonathan Star’s
• Philosophical Translation: Arthur Waley’s
• Poetic Translation: Stephen Addiss & Stanley Lombardo

So far, I’ve been doing copywork for the three translations before writing out my version of each chapter. So, now, I’m going to order the three of which I don’t have physical copies and then go back through the ones I’ve already written and do copywork for all five translations, hopefully inciting new ideas and a clearer solution to my collage-equation for each chapter.

Last note: I guess, to clarify my mission, it’s not about selecting words with the utmost fidelity to the Chinese (I have no way of verifying that) but fidelity to the meaning of these lines and chapters. For instance, Mitchell uses “Master” rather than, for instance, “Sage” throughout, and I think that’s a perversion of the Tao Te Ching’s teachings. It’s too masculine. One does not master The Way.

I’m surprised and grateful to have found this free resource: nearly 100 English translations of the Tao Te Ching (Terebess Asia Online).

Aug 22

Drawing a Prediction of Sunset

Educational exercise for creativity in youngsters: At the beginning of sunset, at 7:30 p.m. in the summer let’s say, challenge a group to paint or draw how the sunset will appear twenty minutes later, at 7:50.

For anyone to have any success, they would have to practice this multiple times, but it would be curious and telling which methods emerge. Maybe one child focuses on the cloud and perfectly predict how their bold indigo bodies will be circumscribed by a faint peachy-pink. Maybe that child only draws one cloud and forgets the sun. Maybe another focuses on the moon and how bright it would become relative to the sky behind it, its current phase, and how the setting sun would highlight it, whether clouds would have moved in front or behind it in that time. And maybe another produces an impressionistic frenzy of a landscape, focusing only on color, layering it all in there, how the sky overhead differs from the horizon, and how the light differed from north from south, etc.

Maybe one group rushes in at “Go” to get as many details down of the predicted scene within their heads, and maybe another group chooses to sit and observe for at least half the time, recognizing patterns and noticing cloud movements, even still deciding their subject. Then, they start closer to the target snapshot of time, which makes the prediction easier: they more closely match the current colors rather than how the other group may be predicting the intrusion of pink without yet seeing any in the firmament.

Just to keep it fair and somewhat competitive, let’s say that you take a video at 7:50, chatting the whole sky in panorama, and the children vote on who most accurately captured the scene, but they all pass one another’s works around, praising and critiquing and learning from their peers’ processes.

Now I want to do this myself and see how I fair.

Aug 24

An ironic self-edit I made just now in an email to a client: Talking about a book-title idea, I said “it’s accurate and communicates a lot per word,” which I have since edited to “it’s accurate and economical.”

Aug 25

My Local Charlotte Bookstore

I have yet to find my go-to bookstore in Charlotte, but the 2026 Greater Charlotte Bookstore Crawl participants list seems like a great place to start.

I bought Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude at Cleary’s, but I didn’t adore the vibe there. I love Belmont and the look of this one: Belmont Bookshop, which is now at the top of my list. I could make a whole morning of it starting at the Everyday Café and then finishing on a bench in Stowe Park. Park Road Books seems to be the Charlotte-proper default, but I walked by it recently and didn’t even have the desire to go in—feels too sterile, too much like Barnes & Noble.

My goodness, praise be! I have already found my go-to bookstore just by browsing Belmont Bookshop’s site, wooed by their dedicated Consignment page for Creators. Also, they’re open 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday, and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday & Monday! Also, the subtitle of their store signals refinement and attention to quality and detail: “Books and Other Curiosities.” Also, they have a very classy and forthright statement on their affiliate webstore on Bookshop.org. Also, they host many, many community events and author talks, and now I want to volunteer to go there and read to children for Treehouse Story Time.

Aug 26

Here’s some evidence that “write simply” is poor, or at least incomplete, advice:

There is nothing new under the sun.

That idea could be stated more simply as “There is never anything new” or even “Nothing is new,” but neither of those are nearly as memorable as Ecclesiastes 1’s “under the sun” version.

Any words the careful writer uses in excess of meaning-making she uses in service of memory-making.

This is an overdue addition to my list of favorite words: enjoy, for the simple relationship between its prefix and root; literally, “to fill with joy,” “to imbue with joy.” This word reinforces the fact that joy is a choice and is always accessible, that it comes from within one and seeps out into the world, into one’s life and into others’.

An inexhaustive list of everyday sensualities: Goosebumps, massage, erection, menstruation, hot bath, cold shower, dawn; sipping coffee, sniffing tea, eating anything, hugging anyone, bowels moving, hunger rapping, baby crying, beholding sky, holding insect, eye contact, tickles, whispers, heart beating, lungs filling, floating, falling, stillness, music, twilight; hypnogogic visions, and anything that causes goosebumps.

//

v2: Goosebumps, massage, hypnopompic mem’ries, river/meadow/mountain/stream, hot bath, cold shower, dawn; sipping coffee, sniffing tea, eating anything, hugging anyone, bowels moving, hunger rapping, baby crying, beholding sky, holding insect, eye contact, whispers, heartbeats, lungs filling, floating, falling, stillness, music, twilight; hypnogogic visions, and anything that causes goosebumps.

//

v1: Goosebumps, hypnopompic mem’ries, massage, hot bath, cold shower, dawn; sipping coffee, sniffing tea, eating anything, hugging anyone, bowels moving, hunger rapping, whispers, eye contact, baby breathing, beholding sky, holding insect, encountering animal, heart beating, lungs filling, floating, falling, stillness, music, twilight; hypnogogic delights, and anything that causes goosebumps.

This little list is inspired by a conversation I had recently with close friends, a topic I broached by saying, “American culture is over-sexualized and under-sensualized,” which led our group to brainstorm sensual experiences that we have regularly (that are asexual). Setting out, we thought there would be few, but we quickly disproved that hypothesis; our list metastasized and changed our entire shared perspective on the question. By the end, our conclusion was that anything met with complete presence and attention is sensual, for the medium of all earthly experience is body.

Lastly, two honorable mentions that do not quite meet the criterion of “everyday”: neutral buoyancy and terminal velocity.

Writing is not the thing created but the medium through which it is communicated. There are as many different kinds of writers as there are reasons to write: to tell a story, to explore an idea, to record information, to understand oneself and to be understood. Writing is not like music, which is the thing created; instruments, the mediums for it. And this is important for the writer to understand the connect with, because there is no fundamental human impulse to write, like there is such an impulse to make music. There are, however, fundamental human impulses to tell stories, explore ideas, and record information, to understand oneself and be understood. The writer is better off identifying with their primary, base impulse more than with the writing.

Also unlike music, words are not inherently valuable, nor the act of writing. Inherently, good and valuable are those primordial impulses, but writing is only valuable if it arises from and is practiced in service of one or more of those true motives. The reason to make music is to make music. Writing with no rhyme or reason (in the truest sense) is called gibberish or, now, more commonly, slop.

Sensuality is sexuality-as-potential-energy. Sensuality is a mass teetering atop a precipice without becoming kinetic. They are distinct and do not overlap but are near neighbors, separated by a thin membrane. It’s also analogous to the relationship between a square and rectangle; sex is inherently sensual, yet sensuality takes many forms other than sexuality.

I remember, as a young boy, occasionally waking up to feelings of intense hunger. I remember feeling into those feelings and reaching confusion; it was like hunger but not hunger. I did not want or need food. I remember wondering, Maybe this is a hunger for something other than food. And those feelings were, in fact, my first sexual urges, which could be described as hunger for the sustenance of a species.

Aug 28

Grow or rot, then die either way. If you grow, you stay young. You remain an adolescent. More precisely, you continue doing the verb adolescere(the Latin root of the noun) which means “to ripen.” One who grow continues to ripen, which means that one is not yet ready to be harvested and has not even begun to rot.

Aug 29

They say hair, teeth, and nails go together. Well, every hairstylist I’ve ever had has used the thinning scissors on me, the ones that chop half the strands down to stumps and leaves the other half full borne. I’ve never had a cavity. And my nails are effectively knives.

[[To Itch But Not to Scratch]]

Instead of saying “Tell me something about yourself,” ask, “What have you been focused on lately?”

Aug 30

Notes on Silo Season 3, Ep. 9

I feel cheated by Silo Season 3. They’re using how much I care about Juliet and crew in Silo 18 to make me watch the “Before-Times” crap that should have been a bottle episode. Only now—at the very end of this season—do I have a reasonable idea of how everything came to be. The most interesting thing is the idea that Stinson and crew caused nuclear war / extinction to create the conditions for the Silos to be necessary. Again, otherwise, the whole senator/congressman shit should have been a single, uninterrupted hour. If anything, maybe they do half of it as a S2 bottle episode and the other half in S3. What they’ve chosen to do, with all the cutting from the underground to the lush Before Times just undercuts everything I actually care about, with the characters who actually matter. I do like Helen’s character quite a lot, and Daniel’s shone in this latest episode. But my goodness, I otherwise couldn’t give a shit. Why should I know the answer to “Why?” before Juliet does, before Bernard does? It deflates the whole narrative engine, which would be best designed as the viewer being lock step with Silo 18’s (not only Juliet’s) collective understanding of the world and their place in it. Now, my knowledge far exceeds the protagonist’s, and my learning outpaces hers. It’s not good for anyone. By the end of this episode, I don’t even know what Juliet’s crew did or was planning to do in Water Supply! I am left guessing, which is a different thing than leaving big, world-defining mysteries unanswered. The former is annoying; the latter is intriguing.

Just now, after reading a bit more about Season 3, I learned that seasons 1 and 2 covered the events of the first book in the trilogy, Wool, Hugh Howey’s self-published smash-hit. That makes sense. Not only were those seasons closely adapted but adapted from the strongest book in the series.

Then, this is my assumption I just confirmed: the second book, the prequel book, Shift doesn’t have Juliet at all until the end. It’s strictly about the Before Times and jumps through time and space to give the whole context for Silo 18, including the first major rebellion in that silo. In the show, they “brought up” events from the third book, Dust, and spliced them in with the prequel material, which is why this entire season feels so slow and incomplete.

Why? Because the show couldn’t possibly justify having their A-list actors off-screen for an entire season. And that’s fair. But it was the wrong decision for the adaption. Instead, skip the prequel book. Go straight from Wool to Dust, and get creative about revealing any essential information from the Before Times. Although, again, I can’t imagine or understand how there could be any information that is essential for the viewer to know but not essential for our main characters in Silo 18 to know. They could have just left those questions unanswered, or maybe answered some with a bottle episode like I said.

Now I need to read Howey’s trilogy to better understand this structural blunder. I’m sure I’d prefer Shift to the show’s third season, but Wool would need to be freaking killer to beat clear the quality bar set by Season 1.

The show should have been three seasons: Season 1: Juliet Goes Out

Season 2: Juliet Comes Back

Season 3: Juliet & Friends Find Out

I haven’t even read Dust, so this is not a spoiler, but here is my stab at what Season 3’s structure should have been.

• Juliet returns but is brainwashed, and her friends are left in limbo, unable to learn anything, until she regains her memory.
• Juliet is back, shares about the Safeguard.
• Camille resists, learns about Robert’s involvement.
• Lucas and Kennedy go out, attacked.
• Sheriff solves murder case, finds elevator.
• Vitamin D+ added to the water supply.
• Mechanical Crew comes up with a plan to prevent Safeguard.
• Bernard goes out as a distraction. [This is Season 3, ep. 9 of the show, which is clearly at the midpoint/turn of the three-act structure of the third book, Dust.]
• Cut to Lucas and Kennedy in 17, who return with the others from that Silo.
• Everyone in Silo 18 wants to go out.
• Camille somehow is killed or taken out of power.
• Juliet has to prevent rebellion without mentioning the Safeguard or the tunnel plan.
• Successful tunnel dug to Silo 1.
• Rebellion of all of Silo 18 vs. their oppressors in Silo 1 (book and trilogy climax).
• Denouement: Sill not safe outside, nowhere really to go, still need to live in Silos. But they vow and try to unite the silos into one big community, connecting everything by tunnels, sharing resources and knowledge of the Before Times, uniting under the shared purpose of being the last hope for all of humanity (which is how they continue to endure life underground).

Aug 31

The Genius of Leaf-Cutter Ants (and Their Clear Allegory to Human Civilization)

All ants of the Attini tribe grow fungus as an agricultural product and have done so for 66 million years, since the Great Extinction, which (as theorized) may have been a catalyst for ants in suddenly decimated habitats to transition from foraging to farming. For around thirty million years, Attine ants have engaged in higher agriculture, which is perfectly analogous to our relationship with our crops: both species are entirely dependent on one another for survival.

Higher-ag ants like your leaf-cutter ants produce unique species of fungi that are present nowhere other than inside the chambers of these ants’ colonies, have special molecular structures optimized for easy harvesting and consumption, cannot survive in the wild nor reproduce with any other fungal species, and serve as the sole source of food for their respective ants. Since early in their evolutionary history, the Attini tribe of ants lost the ability to produce a critical amino acid called Argenine, of which their fungi are the sole providers. (The ants have no gut microbiome to decompose the leave’s cellulose into glucose and amino acids, so the serves as their external and communal digestive system. and since the fungus yields amino acids directly, the ants have no need to spend their body’s energy to produce it internally, even though it is essential to their survival.)

Leaf-cutter ants are the most agriculturally advanced of the Attines but, arguably, have the most risky strategy. The lifespans of their queens can reach decade, and the scale of their colonies can reach kilometers. And in South and Central America’s rainforests, where they thrive, leaf-cutter ants harvest the most plant material of any group of herbivores in the ecosystem. Cut directly from live, growing leaves, the biomass the leaf-cutter ants extract is pristine; unlike their Attine cousins, they do not settle for decaying or dead biomass: only the best food for only the best fungi. But if trees suddenly became less abundant, or their leaves suddenly toxic (this actually happens; as a tree is getting cut to death, it seeps out a toxin that poisons the fungus, and the ants recognize the sabotage and move on to a different tree), the leaf-cutter ants’ fungi would dwindle and rot, and their queens and workers would die. In that way, the leaf-cutter ants’ agriculture is unlike our own: they only have one crop, which only be farmed using one source of fuel.

Thankfully we are a bit more diversified in our methods, but the structure remains the same, and by studying these ants, we have the benefit of seeing our own risks on a small scale, especially if we were to ever over-index on one fuel source, like nuclear power. Now, a nuclear-only human civilization would be perfectly analogous to the leaf-cutter ants.

Our nuclear reactors are the ants’ fungal gardens in their colonies’ chambers; our heavy-metal isotope fuel is the ants’ leaves. And the resulting energy that we harvest and transport and consume is the ants’ swollen, nutrient-rich swollen clusters on their cultivated fungi (gongylidia). For both, too much fuel means meltdown, and too little fuel means starvation and death.

Another critical detail and similarity is abstraction, as is necessary to achieve agriculture in any form. The thing harvested is not the thing consumed: e.g., leaves and Uranium. The only thing that is consumed is the thing cultivated: e.g., nutrient-rich fungal nodules and nuclear-energy-as-electricity.

The above comes from my existing curiosity with these animals and from these three YouTube videos I just binge-watched:

• PBS: “How Leaf Cutter Ants Feed a Killer Fungus”
• Ted Ed: “How the leafcutter ant queen runs her farm”
• PBS Eons: “When Ants Domesticated Fungi”