Quite a few things about new home construction, and indeed some of our ideas of what a single-family home should be like, bug me. For instance, I’ve noticed that ever since I was a kid in the 2000s traipsing about the wooden shells that were … Continue readingBuilding a Better House
Recently, I was prompted to consider the issue of what kind of sexual, marital, and familial landscape we’re heading towards by comparisons on Twitter between the political effects of mass singleness, childlessness, and virginity in South Korea as a prelude to what will be the … Continue readingNo Solace for the Single?
It strikes me that most people in love, sex, romance, and family formation choose much the same path they do in investing: putting all their eggs into the medium-risk medium-reward basket. What if that was the very worst strategy you could possibly choose? What if … Continue readingAntifragility in Love and Life
Making daylight saving time permanent, i.e. the “Sunshine Protection Act”? Blech. What we really need is to make standard time permanent; in the spirit of the rather propagandistic moniker springing forward for good goes by these days, I’ll call my solution of falling back for … Continue readingFor a Darkness Protection Act
As I touched upon in a previous post, it’s a bit odd we don’t have mile-high futuristic towers in our cities built by the richest companies in the world to show off their power, and just because humanity can. Well, I’m a science fiction writer … Continue readingA Short Story in the Urban Fabric?
Where are all the gleaming futuristic towers stretching like needles a mile or more into the sky like science fiction promised would be the Future, realized by the 21st century? The closest we’ve come to a real-life Coruscant, at least aesthetically, is places like Dubai; … Continue readingWhere’s My Mile-High Tower?
When driving home yesterday evening I had on this cool Youtube video (featuring the delightful song “Night Drive” by Timothy Drury and Corridor) that featured a gorgeous drive through what I’m pretty sure is Dubai. Which got me thinking about those gleaming Coruscant-esque cities blossoming … Continue readingGleaming Cities of the Eclipsed
The other day on the road, which was lined with garbage and litter, I saw groves of trees being cleared, leaving poor little raccoons homeless, to build “luxury housing”…but not luxury enough to keep any of the woods it seems. That arouses several thoughts in … Continue readingGermanic America’s Strange Dearth
At LessWrong Virgil Kurkjian has a fascinating post, “Leto among the Machines”, analyzing Frank Herbert’s “Dune” chronicles, specifically its worldbuilding point of the Butlerian Jihad (the elimination of computers from human civilization), from a “rationalist” perspective, especially how the Butlerian Jihad makes perfect sense once … Continue readingNemesis Among the Machines
It’s recently struck me that people in the science-fiction setting I write in and worldbuild live dangerously, or, more to the point, just don’t have the kind of risk aversion and (as I like to put it) “safety cultism” that plagues our modern cultures in … Continue readingLiving Dangerously on the High Frontier