From one of the three post-ASI factions inhabiting my exoplanet world

My gateway drug into the world of computers c. 2020 was the networked note-taking apps, Roam Research and Obsidian. These apps promise the user a galaxy-brained interface for deep thinking via an interlinked network graph of text files.

Though they’re fascinating and beautiful, they’re also a little dorky and can lead to a recursive hell of self-reflection if you’re not careful. I’ve tended to my Obsidian vault daily for the last five years, love it dearly, and try to keep quiet about it in polite company.

So you can imagine my vindication as I watch the world’s preeminent technology converge on interconnected markdown files as its preferred way of organizing information. Claude and friends are just as in love with networked note-taking as I am. In the latest talk on the AI Engineering YouTube channel, the Anthropic team argues that you should not build agents, but instead build “Skills”—that is, folders of interconnected markdown files.

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“two guys giving a 16 minute talk about markdown files to a packed audience 🤩” a top video comment writes. Steph Ango, the CEO of Obsidian, later retweeted a screenshot of the comment triumphantly.

Since the release of Opus 4.5 a couple weeks ago—hands down the best LLM in the world right now—I’ve been so busy setting it loose in my Obsidian vault that I’ve barely used it at all for writing code.

In particular, I’ve been using Claude Code inside my Obsidian vault, coupled with some Skills related to image generation, to build a science fiction world. This active imagination exercise has arrived in my life with the force of revelation. I haven’t had this much fun since I was a kid.

I wonder if anyone will care about the contours of the world that I’ve built, on a Mediterranean exoplanet by the name of Proxima Janus. It’s an eyeball planet with three factions, each with a different relationship to superintelligent AI. I’ll leave it there for now. Describing long AI conversations to other people has the same flavor as describing your psychedelic trip or a dream you had—I suspect it’s a little solipsistic and annoying to the listener. I’ll leave a video walkthrough of the world’s lore below, and you can either press play or not.

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I’m going to talk about the process in this post instead. I think it offers a glimpse of what ambitious, solo creative projects might look like in the near future.

On AI’s “jagged frontier,” the strongest new capabilities first appear as coding skills. The new intelligence then, if we’re lucky, migrates to less structured, testable languages like English. And there’s a technique from AI-assisted software development that I used in this world-building project that I think deserves more attention in non-technical contexts. It’s called “spec-driven development.”

The big idea in spec-driven development is that you and the AI start your coding project by making a giant “specification document” in markdown, which describes in no uncertain terms what you want your app or feature to do. That way, every coding agent session gets the full, detailed plan you agreed on, and checks things off step by step as it works. This is a big improvement on the default mode of coding agents, which is Memento-style amnesia.

It turns out you can use this exact kind of process to do the work of a giant creative design team for imaginative work, especially if you incorporate Skills and use some of the new visual art AI models like Nano Banana Pro.

I had a creative process file where Opus 4.5 and I did some research on what it was like to create the Avatar world on James Cameron’s creative team, or to create Final Fantasy 7 with the Squaresoft team in 1997. What kind of project management approach did they take? What was their workflow like? How would they write out everything they did as a step-by-step sequence? Opus 4.5 spawned sub-agents, researched each topic, and then we thought through how to convert that into essentially a giant spec document for this imaginary world.

With each new chat session I would progress through this very rich AI-generated checklist that had entries like: sketch out the planet’s geography, its climate, different major locations, characters, plot points—all geared around concept art and creating these sort of asset bibles for different factions that maintained consistent styles.

This got truly exhilarating when I started “multi-Clauding” in numerous terminal windows, using speech-to-text to increase my WPM and juggling numerous aspects of the world at once, while beautiful concept art appeared in my asset folders via Nano Banana Pro and lore files populated the “EYEBALL-1” folder in my Obsidian vault. It felt like lucid dreaming.

From the climactic scene of the pilot

I set out doing this because sci-fi/fantasy worldbuilding was something that I took extreme delight in as a kid, and I wanted to refill my creative well as I started to get burnt out by work a couple months ago. And I must say it exceeded my expectations, and my cup runneth over.

It’s in my nature to overcommit to things I’m excited by, and so I have been picturing using Runway ML and Veo 3 to convert this world into a tight eight-episode prestige HBO drama once I figure the story out. Cooler heads will probably prevail in the short term, but this has absolutely reoriented and expanded my vision of what AI can do right now.

I’m thinking about sharing a starter kit sometime soon, with a CLAUDE.md file inside an Obsidian vault with some prepackaged skills, so other people can try out this rapid, solo creative speedrunning. Let me know if that’s something you’d be interested in.

But before then I’m really, really excited to go back to the drawing board and try out this spec-driven vibe art approach for other wild bucket list dreams I have. My kingdom for a few more hours in the day. As they say, we are like trillion dollar James Cameron movie studios now. We might as well get used to it.

Got some new content in the works, but for now—here’s a piece I wrote for a recent governance futurist project I was a part of. While I don’t believe in the ‘network state’ as proposed by the tech-right, I find the ideas surrounding what might succeed the “nation state” in a post-internet world pretty fascinating. This was my attempt to (polemically) imagine a positive vision of such a thing. Enjoy! And I’m looking for new collaborators these days—if you’ve dug any of my work, please do reach out on Bluesky @joetforhire.com or Twitter @joetforhire. 🫡

I might be misremembering, but I think it was Buckminster Fuller who said, "Don't try to replace the old thing with the new thing. Instead, build the new thing directly on top of the old thing. Push the old thing down one sedimentary layer so it can live on as a vestigial-compost-fossil fuel hybrid that will shape our future in weird, unpredictable ways."

This is the most crucial pattern to grasp in changing superstructures. You simply must ignore what’s going on around you. Look up and build a ladder. The old systems are beyond saving. Start assembling whatever succeeds the nation-state in plain sight and blissful ignorance. The limbic system plopped right on top of the reptile brain. In every mammal there is something of the eyeball-licker. The neocortex, stuck on top ofthem, elbowed its way into a new, big forehead and floored the gas pedal.

The old system is still turning its massive cogs while the new system slithers around them. Proust smells a cookie, remembers, writes a novel. Would you like to remember these turbulent 20s in a similar way?

To accelerate, build above, without dismantling.

That's why the John McAfee guys bushwhacking their way toward Randian utopias in central America are missing the mark. The world is already country-fied. There are no blank slates in old games. Why build a government from first principles in someone else's backyard?

You’re using a network state to purchase land? Cool, I’m hunting whale blubber aboard a U.S. naval destroyer. The prime minister did not kill the English king and take his crown. The king is compost. Fossil. A little flavor.

To progress, levitate one self-organizing layer upward. The nation-state is the limbic system of the hivemind. Mammalian: alpha dogs, mother’s milk.

Pivot to the neocortical. To erupt into open rebellion and secede from the living configurations is a death sentence. Our foundation must be the 'parallel polis' of the Czechoslovak dissidents of the 70s. Something that can eat the enemy’s soul away from the inside. Living in truth.

The end of history came with the triumph of the optimal meta-nation: market intelligence, a bill of rights, a golden door and a path to naturalization. The local minimum of hegemonic democracy.

As history returns, we are challenged to venture out to the frontiers again.

This is what Vitalik was getting at when he said "the only logical successor state to the USA is the internet."

Instead of running parallel we head upward, to atmospheric supergovernance. The shining city on a hill grows dim. Beyond it: a planetscale honeycomb in the cloud.

In the background, I’ve also been revisiting some of my favorite childhood edutainment, hunting for good examples of learning design. In a few weeks, I should have some exciting updates on what I’m building. For now, some nostalgia. There’s some real treasure in here.

• Joe

Wishbone’s Amazing Odyssey

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Game Concept

You’re the famed Jack Russell Terrier of the PBS kid’s show, sucked into an ancient literature simulator that puts you in the sandals of Odysseus at the start of Homer’s Odyssey. It’s a point-and-click adventure game where you solve puzzles that each correspond to different parts of the story, leading to your triumphant return home to your wife.

Fun Level

God tier. The puzzles were designed by people who prioritized the child’s experience. Many similar games, unaccountable in this respect as they are, design puzzles for the enjoyment of the adult game designers. These puzzles are the right level of difficulty for a dedicated child ~9 or so—which isn’t to say they’re easy.

Even better, the game is spooky. Odysseus’s crew get swallowed by Cyclops, drowned in Charybdis, and sent to Hades by wrathful gods. No matter what you do, your staff thins out over the course of the adventure.

As a kid I let my starving crew eat the cattle of the sun god and remember being viscerally disturbed by the game over screen I earned, in which we all were doomed to a vengeance too horrible to name. You really gotta hand it to em.

This crewmate is about to get swallowed in one gulp.

Learning Level

Also premium. I think their task is well-suited to a video game, which made this an easier goal to hit. Learning the beats of a well-worn story is easier to accomplish while point-and-click adventuring than, say, the basics of biology.

Total Score

I’m starting the review off with my favorite. No video game south of Disco Elysium has captured my imagination like the Dog Odyssey, to this day.

4/4

Encarta’s Mind Maze

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Game Concept

An add-on to the Microsoft Encarta encyclopedia suite, this procedurally generated maze advances you through a castle dungeon by answering questions about the contents of the encyclopedia.

Fun Level

Pretty mid. What child’s going to memorize these facts? I remember setting the trivia categories to “Sports, Hobbies, and Pets” because I knew their questions sets were smaller, so that I could memorize the answers.

Learning Level

Basically none.

Total Score

It earns some points from the wonder you experience stumbling across this tucked-away game in an encyclopedia. The accidental way in which I discovered it pushed me forward even when I slogged through sports trivia.

2/4

Maurice Ashley Teaches Chess

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Game Concept

The designers of this game included just about everything a child would need to learn to play and love chess. The practice sections teach you fast and drill your fundamentals sports-style, but my favorite sections were the master games, which someone on YouTube was kind enough to record.

Fun Level

Pretty great. Short of some kind of ‘story mode’ or other motivators to play and win, I don’t know how they could’ve made chess any more fun.

More than anything else, watching this outrageous game of Tal’s, the ‘Magician From Riga,’ turned me into an absolute obsessive.

Learning Level

You learn chess very fast, and learn the basic strategic/tactical ideas quickly too. The sports metaphors help make the concepts stick, even for non sportsfans.

Total Score

Ignited a lifelong love of chess I hold to this day. 3.5/4

Bill Nye’s Stop the Rock!

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Game Concept

A first person point and click adventure game where you’re in Bill Nye Laboratories after a rogue AGI sends a meteor (“Impending Dume”) hurtling toward earth. You have to solve its riddles to save the planet.

Fun Level

Very fun just to walk around and explore, even if I found the content a little too zany to follow at times.

Learning Level

The whole set is full of tiny science experiments and factoids. However, the puzzles were a little too clever for how old I was when I got it. It really is difficult to make the actual bits and pieces of the puzzles interface properly with a little kid’s mind. I beat maybe one of the AGI’s handful of riddles. I mainly just looked around.

Total Score

3/4

Window’s 3D Movie Maker

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Game Concept

It’s a kid’s movie-making software that, brilliantly, comes with a bizarre open world full of weird characters to explore while you make your movies.

Fun Level

Very high. The world of the movie set, theater, and related side alleyways and curious pitstops is full of weird, mysterious, interesting stuff. The lack of an agenda/games or puzzles makes it somehow more engaging.

Learning Level

Well, there wasn’t much content we were expected to pick up. But I made a ton of movies with this thing. The movie editor, which you can see in the clip above, is surprisingly sophisticated for something from 1995.

Total Score

A masterclass on how you should surround your tool/core product with a fun little open world and some lore to keep it company. 3.5/4

Amazon Trail, 3rd Edition

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Game Concept

A slick remix of the Oregon Trail in which you have to make it through the Amazon river. You pick a tour guide and then need to manage your rations, food, keep from getting sick, etc.

Fun Level

There was definitely enough challenge and intrigue to warrant seeing how far I could get. But in some ways it felt unclear how to strategize—I didn’t know which choices were better than others.

I remember scratching my head at this tour guide selection screen and thinking I was definitely going to die out there in the jungle.

Learning Level

Of all these games, this one was one of the more purposefully educational. You could definitely picture it in a school computer lab. However, it did seem like a lot of the factoids were overlayed on top of the gameplay and not baked directly in. You can get out of your boat and go learn about Amazonian wildlife, for instance, but I don’t remember it helping your score go up.

Total Score

An immersive feeling of adventure, but not enough juice to keep me playing. 2.5/4

Special Mention: U to U

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Show Concept

Your reward for making it this far is to hear about the single most underrated, ahead-of-its-time creation of the golden age of children’s television.

This one isn’t a game but instead an insanely forward-thinking TV show on Nickelodeon. U to U only ran for a couple years in the mid-90s, but we will collectively only be ready for its ideas sometime in the late 2030s, after we’ve stopped damaging our children with social media.

“Welcome to U to U,” the show’s co-host Sertrone Starks says, “the kid created, interactive, onlining, globally connected—”

“Wait wait wait,” co-host Ali Rivera interrupts. “You mean the place where kids have creative control? Because all the songs, stories, poems, jokes—everything on U to U comes from kids?”

“Precisely. In fact, if you look around the core, our super database where all kid connections are processed, you’ll see everything you send us on the control tower and your name on the message board.”

An actual kid-connection processing superdatabase.

It was like a single, benevolently moderated, well-curated worldwide televised internet forum for kids. Absolutely genius.

Years later, projects like 826 Valencia would take similar tacks—children would come to the after school center, write a short story, and professional illustrators, editors, and book-binders would help them shape it into a professional art product.

But U2U was unique in its techno-optimism—for instance, in its determination to collect artwork from kids in multiple continents, serving as a kind of electronic pen pal hub. Children designed video games, short films, animated cartoons. Everyone was clearly very excited about the possibilities of the internet. Its high-energy, variety show atmosphere captured my imagination as a child like nothing else on TV did.

Check out this YouTube comment under one of the archived episodes:

GPAnimations, it appears, has since gone on to illustrate professionally. Good job, U to U.

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In the future I may dig around these archives some more and present the results of more serious research. It deserved better than a two year run.

Total Score

5/4 - Someone really should bring this back.

I write this from a hunting shack somewhere on the Florida-Georgia border, on the way back home after another three week stay with my family. Dad got a major back surgery and we helped mom out with the chores and live-in care.

Like many aging millennials, I began COVID with a frantic interest in my parents' well-being. When we thought it might kill them, I was eager to set aside old grievances and make another try at a healthy relationship.

I wonder how many other prodigal 30somethings now sadly remember why they stayed so far away before.

Wifey chose the stops, and she opted for two nights in BnBs to cut our daily driving down. At five hours per leg, it has been downright cushy. Tonight, on our second evening, we're deep in the sticks-- lawns full of mud-covered four wheelers; maskless convenience stores selling overstocked Trump swag. I saw a flag outside a trailer that was two flags: the stars and stripes with a white hand at the bottom, pulling up the curtain to reveal a rebel one.

The church marquee before the dirt road asked us, "Have you tested positive for Jesus?" Good trolls, just like their leader.

"Weird," my girlfriend said. "You look like a redneck, but you are so opposed to them."

Later, she walked our dog down the trail, a gentle, pudgy Beagle mix. When they got back her face was flushed. "We saw a bunch of Poochos!" she said. "They were all in cages! They looked just like him, but they were loud and crazy." He got scared when they started whelping, she said. He tried to hide behind her leg.

"Poor guy." I picked him up and hugged him, thinking of the rednecks from earlier. "Me and Poocho, so misunderstood."

Seph, Redesigned

We've since returned to sunny Florida, where it's finally time to party.

View the tweet on Twitter

Soon I'll need a new excuse to stay inside.

Meanwhile, Seph News has been redesigned with another cutting-edge tech stack. (For the nerds: NextJS, Sanity, and the react-force-graph npm package). Learning to code never ends, but once you reach a cruising altitude the learning is far less painful. I think I'm pretty good now! The 'notes' section contains a network graph on each page which can be expanded to show first- or second-order children. (The graph can also be viewed for each blog post by going to the top of this page and clicking on "View in graph.")

Pretty!

But wait, there's more! On the backend of the site, where I'm writing this, there's another graph in my content management system:

The smaller pink dot in the middle is the very post you're reading.

But wait, I've completely lost my mind! Most of my notes are actually written in Roam Research, where I made a SmartBlock hook up to a Heroku Express server to immediately send them over to my Sanity CMS. Roam, too, has a network graph.

I need to go outside.

It was a lot of code to integrate-- with my sluggish left brain, it took a week just to learn the Datalog.

Datalog feels like speaking French-Chinese out of two mouths at once.

A SmartBlock is triggered for a note and its indented bullet points-- they hit the API with a POST request and create a new Sanity document.

From here...

..it is sent...

...to here.

In hindsight, building this elaborate system was mostly a learning exercise. My notes section is no Borgesian library. But maybe you'll find some enlightening stuff. I'm also planning on creating a starter site so others who want a similar set-up can get one easily.

A Mania For the Network As Art

Have I spent most of the last year fetishizing network graphs and the writing softwares they enable? Obviously. "Tools for thought," the trendy software space for human thought-enhancement, is still completely fascinating to me, even if at times it seems like a vanity-metric-filled rabbit hole. In the words of Wittgenstein, "if people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done."

I checked out Mark Wigley's 2001 essay "Network Fever" recently, hoping to get some insight into the obsessives that came before me. The architectural theorist traces the origins of network thinking back to obscure 1960s counterculture conferences and the work of Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller. His tone is mostly critical.

We are constantly surrounded by talk of networks. Every third message, article, and advertisement seems to be about one network or another. We are surrounded, that is, by talk on networks about networks. It is as if our technologies feed on a kind of narcissistic self-reflection... Nowhere escapes the net.

But the silly ideas he quotes are actually pretty interesting! Take this infographic from a 1972 Doxiadis conference, shortly after the discourse had been "overwhelmed with network fever":

In 1972, Doxiadis presented photographs of a spider's web before and after the animal had been drugged with amphetamines. The distorted organization of the doped spider was compared to a map showing "the chaos of networks" in the urban Detroit area.

On the left, a sober spider's web. On the right, a spider on amphetamines.

A map of Detroit roadways, presumably crafted by a tweaked-out spider.

To create healthy webs, the architect argued, we must "coordinate ALL of our networks NOW." Communication, transportation, agriculture--the graphs have got to look better!

There's a case to be made that domesticated humans are in an amphetamine-like state-- most of us are addicted to coffee, at least, and if we mapped out the global supply chain we've rushed to erect over the past couple centuries it would probably look a lot like Detroit's interstate. Our networks are not as pretty as they could be, in any case. I would know. I've got lots of pretty network graphs.

Not sure where all this leads, but it's cool to see the Doxiadis conferences still going fifty years later. This post's featured image is a Grecian palace they built a couple years ago. Here's another view, brought to you by the same folks who say we need to sober up our spider brains:

Related Links

In other architectural news, the Seph family's nighttime TV lately has been hours-long binging of tiny house shows. Here's a highlight-- I want to stumble onto this woman's hut after getting lost on a long hike, get invited in and offered a suspicious tea and three wishes, then wake up on the banks of a brook the next morning with a mysterious relic in my pocket, unsure if I dreamed it all.

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My current life-plan: I build a tiny eco-house, connect it to Starlink, and spend my remaining days on a cozy yurt floor with my VR headset on, building the governments of the future on a generous crypto enDAOment. At least, that was the decision last night, when I stayed up till the wee hours gorging on this great interview with polymath tech forecaster Balaji Srinivasan.

If you're interesting in joining some futurist learning experiments, Srinivasan's 1729 project offers BTC bounties to people who solve writing/coding/designing challenges via their newsletter. I'm trying my hand at them this week, and will hopefully spend the remainder of today solving some tricky programming challenges in Elixir.

Where does the number come from? It's not a historical date, though I imagine its founders were happy to connote the European revolutions of that century. It's "the sum of two cubes in two different ways." I don't know what that means either, but here's more:

It’s basically the Ramanujan number.

Srinivasa Ramanujan was India’s greatest mathematician, and kind of like India’s Einstein, but has kind of a romantic story in the sense that he was extremely poor and wrote these letters to mathematicians around the world. He had just self-taught math from a textbook. [...] most [mathematicians] ignored him, just thought he was a crank. And one guy brought him out to England, this guy G.H. Hardy, who thought this guy has to be a genius because no one would make up these equations.

Srinivasa Ramanujan, the "man who knew infinity."

And so then Ramanujan began a rampage through mathematics and has people still to this day going through a page of his notebooks for an entire mathematical journal issue, because he just wrote down all these results that were true, but he didn’t provide the proof. You just intuit the result. So where does 1729 come from?

Ramanujan died very young, very, very young [...] On his deathbed, Hardy came in to try to cheer him up. He said, “Ramanujan, I came in on a taxi and the license plate, it’s very boring. It’s 1729.” And on his deathbed, Ramanujan still had the wit and faculty to say, “Oh, that’s not boring. It’s the sum of two cubes in two different ways.” Because he’s on a first name basis with every number, you know? And that’s kind of the legend of Ramanujan. And so, have you ever seen Good Will Hunting?

Good Will Hunting was kind of based on that.

Why is this the name of his Bitcoin dispensary/future-tech academy? Because it sends a homing beacon out to the Ramanujans of today, who hopefully will come to live longer in a more welcoming world.

We can give this skyhook to people and you can just start with nothing, absolutely nothing other than this phone, which people have made really cheap. And you can do the tutorials, you learn some skills, you level up, you get more tasks, you start leveling up more, you get digital currency. So anywhere there’s a phone, there’s a job and there’s an education and this is what I plan to do with what I’ve been fortunate enough to make, and that’s my contribution to humanity, I think, or hope it to be.

I support this mission.

On a strategic level, if you're trying to get the jump on the imminent end of Pax Americana, helping folks in the global south "leapfrog" with a 4D chess move like this seems like a wise strategy! It reminds me of Sugatra Mitra's Hole in the Wall experiment. In the slums of India he installed public, outdoor computers and let the kids figure it out. This video is two minutes and worth watching.

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Imagine what these could do if they were everywhere: Kenya, Syria, the slums of Detroit-- or for that matter, the trailer parks of the Florida-Georgia border.

Whether or not I find a way to interact with the 1729 project (or solve those Elixir problems!), it feels good just to get excited about it.

I've been "holding the lotus to the stone" these many months, like so many others across the world, retreating from the outside in my little room with my little laptop and searching for some trap door in this screen that could set me free. I have not found full liberation yet, but slowly a path is appearing. I have joined a shitposting guild on Twitter at least, that's gotta be a good sign.

Feel free to DM me if you want to try out for our role-playing X-men groupchat (it's slightly cooler than it sounds). The last time I role-played on the internet I was twelve years old, in an AOL message board called RhyDin, 21 years ago. In a shocking plot twist, they're still around-- an exciting topic for another time.

Anyways I hope you, dear reader, are coming full circle in your own timeline as well. I'll try to stay better in touch.

Hyperpoetry is an experiment in gamified network thinking.

You can check out my prototype here. It takes a while to load-- you could probably read the rest of this post while you wait.

The game involves two players trading quotes and other references back and forth, which link to each other in visually expressive ways.

Move one, by Meryl Streep.

By the end of the game, each reference is joined with the one before it until a pretty string of colored glyphs is created by the players:

The ending move, creating a pretty graph.

My early sketches centered around a couple airy inklings: I'm fascinated by tools for thought and networked note-taking software, but their attempts to create an all-encompassing "second brain" of interconnected ideas can be overwhelming. How could networked knowledge graphs be simplified, while still retaining their beauty?

A day or two into the project I ended up melting this idea into a pet fantasy I've been keeping for at least a decade: The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse was a transformative book for me in my early 20s. It centers around a futuristic society where the creative arts have long since been replaced by a gamified, self-cultivative scholarship. People play the game by making references back and forth to things they've read, elaborating various themes across all dimensions of human knowledge. From the Wikipedia:

The Glass Bead Game takes place at an unspecified date centuries into the future.. The setting is a fictional province of central Europe called Castalia, which was reserved by political decision for the life of the mind; technology and economic life are kept to a strict minimum. Castalia is home to an austere order of intellectuals with a twofold mission: to run boarding schools, and to cultivate and play the Glass Bead Game, whose exact nature remains elusive and whose devotees occupy a special school within Castalia known as Waldzell. The rules of the game are only alluded to—they are so sophisticated that they are not easy to imagine. Playing the game well requires years of hard study of music, mathematics, and cultural history. The game is essentially an abstract synthesis of all arts and sciences. It proceeds by players making deep connections between seemingly unrelated topics.

I've always wondered how to make this vague, wide-ranging plot device into a playable game. There are other attempts online to draw from: GLASS BEAD GAMES – An Infinite Game Playground was especially helpful. Using their glyphs, I made pretty little alchemical symbols that correspond to each move. The prototype has a sample game that uses them. It's played between Charlie Kaufmann and Meryl Streep and they talk about Ender's Game, television tropes, and Wittgenstein.

My submission was voted "Most Creative" by the participants, which was a much-needed hit of love and validation in this long winter. So now I have a smooth $250 and a Leap Motion Controller in the mail. #feelsgood.

There are a lot of other impressive, forward-thinking projects on the Interhackt website (though I don't know how long they plan to leave the site up, and it might be broken by the time you read this). I'm glad I went through with the hackathon and would definitely sign up for something similar again. In the last two days of the sprint I stayed up crazy late and clocked 10+ hours at the computer, doing ye olde maniac burnout routine. I miss it! I left the contest convinced that mildly self-destructive creative marathons are one of the sweetest joys of my life, and I need to make more time for them going forward.

If you dig what I worked on, or have any other cool ideas in the realms of cybernetic thought-enhancement, send me a Twitter or sign up for my newsletter below.

Here's a recap of what I've been listening to this year, month by wonky-ass month. I would've made a bona fide playlist out of these, but several of them aren't actually songs, and they're schizoid in tone and genre-- faithful to my actual state of mind.

Note- At one point these were all embedded Youtube videos, but I learned they won't let you do that if it's copyrighted music. So now they're all links :/

March

He Turned the Water Into Wine - Johnny Cash

I can't be the only one who drifted closer to their birth-religion over the course of the year. During the first exhilarating weeks of COVID, I put this song on in the shower each morning, a private chapel in the steam.

I first discovered the Gospel while wandering through San Francisco in the winter of 2015, squatting in an abandoned restaurant in the Mission with a starchild I met in a coffee shop. We were putting on an art show there, painting next to the rusting grease-traps, and spent a week of all-nighters finishing our pieces to the playlist from which this song comes.

"He Turned the Water Into Wine" was my favorite, in part because of the stomp-and-clap rhythm, but also because of its almost apocalyptic sense of the spread of something world-changing, going viral one mouth at a time. "He said go and tell no man/ But they shouted it through the land..."

April

Dollars and Cents - Radiohead

Plenty of things "hit different" now, but few things hit better than the validation of Thom Yorke's entire discography.

The bridge into unintelligible cooing at 2:38 has always been my favorite part. It is this sound, from their loftiest and most cursed album, that is the theme song of Jeff Bezos's April, a month in which he netted $14B.

May

Oh Sweet Nuthin' - The Velvet Underground

By month three, my Coronavirus strategy had been more or less set in place: I would retreat into the world of computers. I'd picked up a web design gig from a well-coiffed friend and was grinding through the final awful hours of the deadline in early May, waking up involuntarily at 3am most mornings, mind racing.

Shortly after the job was done, the stress-marathon finally came to claim me, and I headed to the ER with sharp heart-pains and a numb left arm.

"Looks like we're having another 'chest pain' day," a smirking nurse said to her coworker as I waited outside.

My heart scans came back fine.

"Got a history of depression? Anxiety?" the doctor asked. There were two nurses in the room with him. "That's probably why your chest hurts."

Anyway, entering the void, this song made a lot of sense.

June

Oh, No - Lil Wayne

With my first computer gig done, I was flush with money and redesigning Infection House, whipping through my Wordpress admin with the latest in no-code page building technology. Determined to outwork anyone and everyone, I stayed up late all month with the Carter 2, smoking my wife's weed while she slept.

After June got into full swing, it was of course in bad taste to keep jamming to gangster songs from the comfort of my tech bro lifestyle. But lord, what a great piece of music-- the sound of a simpler time.

July

The Times Are A'Changing - Bob Dylan

My wife and I were in a July 4th traffic jam on our way back from the grocery, inhaling the exhaust of revving MAGA trucks, proud to be outside and unafraid during the lull in COVID. I was a bit outnumbered to play "War Within a Breath," and the cozy bourgeois vibes of Dylan were better suited to the year's lifestyle anyway. So we cranked it up. And despite marching for most of the month and getting cursed at by our fair share of conservatives, it was the most righteous I'd felt all year.

Like Dylan, I am a mostly apolitical person, only joining the frey during inspiring or opportune times. The song's advice-- to not speak too soon, for what is first will soon be last-- helped soothe me as the spring's mania gave way to the dull, stupefied feeling I've been carrying around ever since.

August

Yuttadhammo Bhikku

I'd made a monkish renunciation by late summer, swapping friends for talking heads on Youtube, trading English for Javascript. Music gave way to more Apollonian sounds.

My wife describes this man as the reason she didn't go to college, which I've always respected very deeply. We fell asleep to him every night, and I tingled at the gentle tonguing of his Pali as he read the Dhammapada. Looking back it was clearly a gateway drug to the harder forms of ASMR yet to come.

September

The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down - The Band

It started as a whimper, an ongoing hiccup in the chest. By the time my wife made it through the office door my head was in my hands, snotwater pouring out of every hole on my face, torso heaving.

When she made it to my side I removed a single, waxy earbud and spun my chair away from the dual screen monitor, Levon Helm still wailing from behind his drumset. My forehead sunk into her chest, my whole being receding, an ebb tide into oblivion.

It has been a long year.

A week later, I tried writing an email to one of the many friends I've fallen out of touch with. I used to spend entire afternoons writing and rewriting my replies. Now every sentence was a chore.

"Spent a couple days weeping uncontrollably to a song about the civil war," I said. "Living and dying for worthless causes... the human condition." It was a long while before I heard anything back.

October

I Washed My Hands in Muddy Water - Stonewall Jackson

Since then, it has been a monthly tradition to cry to a new country song. This one's less baroque, more easy listening-- a little misting, a moment's pause. The song ends with the narrator running from a pack of bloodhounds having freshly escaped a Nashville jail.

"The only breed of dog I've had since 1990 have been Bloodhounds," a guy on YouTube writes in the comment section. "They will trail you til they literally drop. Running won't get you anywhere once they are on your scent." A lot like mid-pandemic depression.

November

ASMR CHEESY FRIED CHICKEN AND CHICKEN SANDWICH

I've mostly given up on music at this point. If the establishment scientists are to be believed, it's probably why I've been so bummed.

"God, he's just so nasty," I think to myself as the man in my ears slurps and crackles through his cheese-dipped fried chicken. I'm trying to get myself back in the tingle-zone, my tolerance rising. I can't open a VSCode terminal these days without first ensuring that there's someone making creepy noises in my headphones.

I actually get the famed meridian response of ASMR videos about 10% of the time I watch them now. It has simply grown comfortable, to share space in my mind with a strange, over-intimate Other. Each smack of the lips is a prayer, each fizzling, spitty gulp of Sprite a wish: pull me from my body, Lord. Free me from this creature that I am.

A few weeks ago, on the verge of finally going stir-crazy, my girlfriend and I decided to spend a few weeks in my parents' basement up north. My parents and I are usually a bit too squabble-prone to cohab together, but desperate times call for getting out of the apartment, and my folks were lonely too. She and I rushed to pack our bags, stashed the dog and cat in the backseat, and set off northward on a two day road trip through the southeast.

We left our small Republican city in Florida around 8am. On our way to the interstate, sun still breaking over the skyscrapers and tops of yachts, we were greeted by a massive roadside protest-- at least a hundred senior citizens, bedecked in their finest Americana, honking and waving flags in support of Joe Biden.

We laughed at how early they must've assembled. Typical. It was hard to imagine the interloper crusties we'd marched with in June getting up at daybreak for social justice. It was a good omen for our trip, we agreed, that this deep in trashy rich folk culture there were still a sizeable number who didn't support our trashy-rich Florida Man in chief.

But a few hours into the heartland of the panhandle, in the red zone of America's fever dream, the signs of course got worse. Like most people with a memory, I wince when the latest polls announce an overwhelming victory for Biden. Down in Floribama, it was Donald Trump or nothing.

Every roadside farm seemed eager to outdo the last one. Most had two or three campaign approved signs, but more impressive were the DIY banners of the True Believers, who painted "VOTE TRUMP" in red paint on plain plywood, hung on their mailboxes or leaned against the side of their fence. It was miles and miles of this, with hardly a house unbranded. Alachua County seemed ready to secede. In the more trucker-frequented causeways, someone had rented out a dozen billboards that read "ONLY GOD AND DONALD J. TRUMP CAN SAVE OUR COUNTRY."

I'd thought I cured most of my Trump Derangement Syndrome over the course of the year, force-watching conservative Youtube shows as a kind of Ludovico treatment after the infowars of the protests almost made my head explode. But this barrage of advertising brought the rabies out of me all over again-- I was back in high school, outnumbered by psycho redneck assholes, palm-sweat slicking the sides of the steering wheel. My attempts at galaxy-brained indifference had fallen flat. I still absolutely hated Donald Trump.

Me watching Louder With Crowder circa mid-July.

We got out to pump gas in a barren, too-quiet microtown where a motorcade was starting a block up from the gas station. A handful of motorcycles, "Bikers for Trump," led truck after truck to rev out onto the state road, "NO MORE BULLSHIT" waving in their beds. We were parked next to a car with New Jersey plates. I sighed and shook my head then glanced his way, hoping for a moment of camaraderie. He was staring at the ground.

A day later we were crawling up I-95 a little north of Richmond, where suburbanites commute hours each day to get to the well-paying jobs near DC. It makes them awful drivers, cutting triple lanes of traffic to inch ahead of one another, desperate to spend an hour or two before bed outside of their car. We let a swarm howl ahead of us only to slam the brakes a few minutes later, stuck in standstill traffic. The map app reported a crash.

Sure enough, thirty minutes later we passed a Kodak moment flanked by firetrucks and highway patrolmen: one economy Ford with three of its four airbags deployed, its rear end crunched against a barricade, and a Cadillac with Trump flags flying above each of its windows, ass up and nose into the forest about a hundred feet from the shoulder.

A lifted, late-model truck idled next to us in the jam, its loud exhaust pipe drowning out the 52nd Leonard Cohen song of my girlfriend's DJ session. The truck's side panel was covered with a decal for Brazzers, the porn company, and on the bumper in small print a sticker read, "Donald J. Trump is the greatest president in American history." I stole a glance at the drivers, wondering if I'd see a porn star. It was two boys, hardly a day over 17.

The Hangovers of the Joke Option

It reminded me of an article I read in January, "The 'Where's My Elephant?' Theory of History" at the now-defunct The Outline. Author Tom Whyman chalks up our current problems to a series of pranks gone wrong.

In short, the argument goes like this:

1. If you give someone a joke option, they will take it.

2. The joke option is (usually) a joke option for a reason, and choosing it will cause everyone a lot of problems.

3. In time, the joke will stop being funny, and people will just sort of lose interest in it.

4. No one ever learns anything.

He describes a dinner table discussion with his dad, where dad proposes two overarching views of historical causality: in one, a conspiracy of elites construct events to serve their powerplays. In the other, "the cock-up theory," history is made up of mistakes made by incompetent actors. Dad subscribes to the second theory, using it to critique leftist utopianism, and contrast it with the more realistic worldview of the conservatives. Whyman proposes a third option.

The “where’s my elephant?” theory takes it name, of course, from The Simpsons episode in which Bart gets an elephant... Bart wins a radio contest where you have to answer a phone call with the phrase, “KBBL is going to give me something stupid.” That “something stupid” turns out to be either $10,000, or “the gag prize”: a full-grown African elephant. Much to the presenters’ surprise, Bart chooses the elephant — which is a problem for the radio station, since they don't actually have an elephant to give him.

After an episode's worth of hijinks, Bart manages to secure the elephant, but wildlife maintenance in his backyard is a lot less fun than trolling the radio station. "Bart has won his joke prize," Whyman writes, "but now he must deal with the joke's consequences."

Don't we all.

Citizen Kane in an Election Year

The featured image is from Citizen Kane, which I watched a couple weeks ago, curious what light it might shed on the awful now.

The still is taken from Kane's election failure-- as the owner of a giant news corps, Kane has two headlines ready for the day after the election: one in which he wins, and the other in which there's a "fraud at the polls."

There are more similarities from there: Kane is born into wealth but remains an outsider to the wealthy establishment. The core campaign promise in his bid for governor is to arrest the incumbent. He's vulgar in a way that working people relate to. It's startling how simple the playbook is.

As usual, the Youtube comments are the source of much enlightenment.

YouTube comments are the privileged medium of meaning.

The similarities end, though: Kane is defeated due to scandal.

A married man, he's caught visiting the apartment of a young singer and accused of infidelity. All papers but his run it, and-- so easily!-- no one votes for him. This part no longer felt realistic. More power to Kane and a Stormy Daniels, they'd say. After all, the kids were raised on porn.

Hey everyone, I am Joe. Welcome to my blog and networked-note repository. For the past five months I've been chained to my laptop, building this website and teaching myself to code at the expense of all hygiene, income, and sanity. I am now unsure I still know how to speak English. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for coming here, and for spending some time with the smelly, broke, crazy person I've become.

It has of course been comforting, in These Times, to spend most of my days in the elegant, sterile world of Javascript. Outside in America, the armies of dumb are on the move. An incompetent Armaggeddon stumbles forward like a drunk looking for its keys.

"And what rough beast..."

It's a great time to drown one's daydreams in workahol, and I'm proud of this little website, flight from reality as it may be. These scotch-taped Flexboxes, these Jenga Tower'd node modules-- they stand as a testament to perseverance, and the good that can be done when a person is not allowed to go outside.

Of course it's not enough, it's never enough, and saving the world is who knows how many more months away. But I do feel like I'm finally getting started.

Why This Exists

Seph News had two core motivations at the outset, both motivated by the psychic chaos of early June this year:

• To prototype a new webmagazine, a follow-up to COVID-19-themed litmag Infection House. (More on this later.)
• To get as far away from social media as possible and still maybe connect with other human beings.

The second aim was especially urgent after the first few weeks of the protests. It's childish to look back on, but I was optimistic about lockdown in the spring.

Forced to stay inside for months on end, I imagined the human race on an inward journey of self-reflection, a kind of mandatory sesshin for the soul. We would return to what truly mattered, leaving the strip malls to crumble, the shared struggle uniting us, the Age of Aquarius surely on its way.

Then Minneapolis exploded, my social network went into DEFCON 5, and I spent weeks glued to Twitter, videos of grisly police violence burning themselves into my eyes. Hashtag BLUEFALL, they called it. It felt like a form of brain damage. I became deeply pessimistic about the future of my projects.

One thing I knew was that there was no way I was watching the rest of the apocalypse unfold from inside Facebook.com. If I had to make my own website, so be it. The predators of surveillance capitalism, like the Brain Bug in Starship Troopers, could surely be bested in time.

I think one of these things is living in my cellphone.

And after a few months at Youtube University, I can confidently tell you it's possible! Anyone can replace their social media profiles with a hand-coded website, if only they're willing to endure a little repetitive eye strain and a few months of estrangement from the people they love.

Though Seph News may not be the flashiest thing to look at, there's a lot of powerful stuff under the hood, and beyond the domain name it all cost precisely zero dollars. I told myself when I started that I wouldn't use any tools that cost money (including tutorials), so if you're low on funds, everything you see here could be yours! I plan to catalog all the resources I used-- by the time you read this, hopefully I'll have a link to my professional dev site in the about section.

Regarding the "Notes"

If your internet wormholes have been different than mine over the past few months, you probably haven't heard of bidirectionally-linked networked note-taking apps, or the hype-tornado they've set off across the tech world. You can of course be forgiven.

In short, a networked note-taking system allows each piece of writing within it to be automatically cited in the notes it links to, which weaves one's writing into a brain-like, unified whole. It's a throwback to many of the early, avant-garde visions of the internet that people had before everything started sucking. There has been a tidal wave of new apps with these tools, many of which were developed in quarantine, and I've become completely obsessed with them.

The Notes section of this website is my attempt at publishing this kind of writing. For now it's pretty rough, but I've got a lot of ideas about expanding it and playing with the data within. I'm so excited by this stuff that I don't know where to start when I try to talk about it-- the ideas were born of quarantine solitude, and still lay private and precious in my skull.

Most networked-thought software allows the writer to create a visual graph of their ideas. This is the graph from my private Obsidian vault, which I've been cultivating since July:

Every node in this graph is a text file.

The topic is vast, and the conversation around it is often full of Silicon Valley hypemen, so it can be a little overwhelming at first. Here are a few links that could help you get started.

• Effective Remote Work was my introduction to the whole enchilada.
• Andy Matuschak, a former researcher at Khan Academy, has been at the forefront of the field for a long time. His guide to teaching yourself quantum physics is a glimpse of what's possible.
• Maggie Appleton's website is where I drew much of my inspiration for Seph News. Her Short History of Bi-Directional Links is the best broad overview available.

But if any of this sounds remotely cool to you, I'd really just recommend downloading Obsidian, writing some random stuff, and seeing if it whets your whistle.

Believe it or not, my interest in Hypertext is directly related to all the madness and despair going on outside. Until we can address the philosophical challenges to our age-- its complete reversal of our established ways of knowing, thinking, and communicating-- our efforts at systemic change will be always be at risk of getting swallowed up and subverted by this giant Holographic machine.

We have to create a new way of thinking, one that is not at the mercy of poorly-understood technology. It may sound a little starry-eyed and tech-broey to say so, but I think these tools for thought can play a major role.

Regarding the "Prototype"

If life actually worked the way I expect it to when writing a to-do list on five cups of coffee, Seph News would likely not exist. This site would've been a multi-author webmagazine of the future, the spiritual successor to Infection House, complete with micropayments, bidirectional links, user authentication, poet-for-hire services, and every other harebrained feature I sketched out in my notebook this year.

Since coding is hard, I needed a baby step, and here we are. But I have not forgotten! The next magazine project is on its way, and I am eager to document the work done on it as it goes. None of this would be worth the blood/sweat/tears if it only served to give me a platform-- what I really want to do is bring my friends and our worldwide network along.

If you dig what you find on this website, please consider signing up for my newsletter. I won't blow up your inbox, or write lame stuff out of a sense of obligation-- just brief, enjoyable updates on things I've been reading and working on. Knowing there are actual people curious about what I have to say is a huge motivation to keep this up.