Today’s my birthday, so naturally I’m in a reflective mood. And given that social media is in its falling-Mario-platforms era, every few months I end up reintroducing myself – or drafting a reintroduction only to not post it. (You can find me on Bluesky here).
Maybe it’s a foolish exercise, to try to pin down one’s multitudes. But also a good chance to look for meaning. To ask if there are themes common to my recent spread of projects and identities, from novels to podcasts, to architecture and gardening and app development and, most recently, to becoming a new father.
Maybe a smarter approach is to let the posts mosaic themselves, like Nick Hornby:
I have a lot of parts to me – sports fan, music fan, reader, writer in various forms, father of neurodivergent and neurotypical children, blah blah – and I’m hoping that eventually my posts will mosaic into a whole person. That would do something for me, even if it doesn’t do anything for anyone else.
In the previous exodus to Bluesky, I half-seriously added “placemaker” to my bio. But I think it’s probably the most prominent thread through my current work. I’m trying to create beautiful spaces, ones teeming with life. Whether they’re fictional or physical, imagined or real, the commonality is worldbuilding.
Speaking of …
Worldbuilding: The Antioch MFA students I’m mentoring this semester had their last of five book circles, and our final read was Kij Johnson’s The Dream Quest of Vellitt Boe, which has more worldbuilding packed into its 172 pages than novels five times its length. It’s full of paragraphs like this one, which opens the book:
VELLITT BOE WAS DREAMING of a highway and ten million birds in an empty sky of featureless blue. The highway, broad and black as a tar pit. The birds, a cloud of them, like a mist writhing, like gnats pillaring over the dark marshes of Lomar or flickering shoals of silver fish in the crystal seas beyond Oriab. The sky: empty, untextured, flat. A great black beast crouching beside her growled steadily, but the birds were louder. One called with a high sweet voice, and it was saying, “Professor Boe? Professor Boe!"
A masterclass in the art, really.
Karl Schroeder’s newsletter, Unapocalyptic, engages with worldbuilding on the regular too, and I loved this recent issue looking at the US election through Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety:
[T]here are two ways for one system to control another: it can increase its own internal diversity to match the complexity of what it’s trying to control; or, it can decrease the diversity of what it’s trying to govern to match its own internal diversity, or ‘degrees of freedom.’
Schroeder then maps these two approaches to the political left and right, respectively, using Ashby’s Law as a lens through which to look at alternatives in governance without the usual political charge (an anti-polarizing filter?). The frame has stuck with me amid all the other post-election punditry.
Speaking of new-to-me computing laws, Zawinski’s Law states:
Every program attempts to expand until it can read [e]mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
Speaking of post-election punditry: this three-minute clip from Jon Stewart has also stuck with me. A question I asked myself that same night was, Does the outcome of this election make the work you’re doing any less urgent? For me the answer – maybe because I’d already reasoned through it eight years ago – is a resounding no. The work remains the same.
Speaking of The Daily Show, I’ve been researching, for a side gig, the organizational systems used by folks who manage exceedingly large archives of raw footage and mixed media. I’m talking documentary filmmakers, law offices, Beyoncé’s personal librarian.
I mentioned this to A. and he said he’s always wondered how The Daily Show is able to pull the exact right five-second clip from a week’s worth of cable news. The answer? A service called SnapStream.
And ending on birthdays: It was Sesame Street’s 55th, and Carl Sagan’s 90th. So I leave you this week with an introduction to a VHS edition of Cosmos … from Jim Henson’s Muppets. Charming as always.