It From Bit

A Dictionary of Demons

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Mythological creatures are interesting because of the wide range of roles they played (and continue to play) in the human imagination of how the world works. They’re a way for us to transform the random chance of systems far beyond our control into relationships with beings that we might have some hope of influincing. I’ve recently been considering using one particular mythological creature as inspiration for a project that may, or may not, at some point become a piece of publishable fiction. But in my pursuit of more options to choose from, I decided I needed more than just a few options. I needed ALL the options.

Thus having created a rabbit hole to throw myself into, the methodology I settled on was simple: start at known mythological creatures, open any and all related Wikipedia pages, and try to summarize my favorites.

But I am throwing in a couple of occult ideas which are fairly modern for fun. I’m treating everything about them as a fact for simplicity.

This list is definitely not comprehensive, because otherwise I would never post it. I’ve excluding totems, shapeshifters (unless they have other supernatural qualities), ghosts, mostly-modern paranormal creatures, succubi, and specific entities (eg Krampus). I haven’t read the 1818 book of the same name, nor have I delved deeply into the more arcane methods of the classification of demons. If this list is missing your favorite demon / spirit / mystery entity, please send an entry to demons@rowan.earth and it will be considered for inclusion in the next publication.

Dictionary

Archon. In Gnosticism, the builders and rulers of the material universe, generally considered evil.

Asura. A titan in Buddhist cosmology. Addicted to emotions like wrath, pride, envy, insincerity, falseness, boasting, and bellicosity, they are plagued by envy for the devas, whom they can see just as animals perceive humans.

Bannik. A bathhouse spirit in Slavic mythology. Must be appeased by offerings or your bathhouse may burn down. Not truly settled into a new bathhouse until a child has been born in it.

Daimon. A lesser deity or guiding spirit such as the daimons of ancient Greek religion and mythology and of later Hellenistic religion and philosophy.

Deva. In Buddhist cosmology, a class of beings or a path of the six paths of the incarnation cycle. It includes some very different types of beings which can be ranked hierarchically according to the merits they have accumulated over lifetimes.

Domovoy. Household ancestral spirit in Slavic mythology. They are protective of the household and especially children.

Egregore. An occult concept representing a distinct non-physical entity that arises from a collective group of people.

Engkanto. Filipino nature spirits that are unbounded to a place, and often take an interest in human affairs. From Spanish encanto.

Etiäinen. A premonition, often of a person, possibly caused by the Haltija of that person.

Fairy (also fay, fae, fey, fair folk, or faerie). A type of mythical being or legendary creature found in Celtic, Slavic, Germanic, English, and French folklore. They have a human appearance and are characterized as mischievous.

Fox spirit. Foxes who can shapeshift; sometimes portrayed as tricksters and sometimes as faithful friends, guardians, and lovers. Korean kumiho, Vietnamese Hồ ly tinh, Japaese kitsune, and Chinese Huli jing are all examples of this.

Fylgja. A spirit which accompanies a person in connection with their fate or fortune in Norse mythology.

Gallu. one of seven devils (or “the offspring of hell”) of Babylonian theology that could be appeased by the sacrifice of a lamb at their altars.

Genius. A spark of divinity that follows each person until their death in Roman mythology. Genii were also attached to places (Genius loci), giving them their special quality. It was extremely important in the Roman mind to propitiate the appropriate genii for the major undertakings and events of their lives.

Hanitu. Term for spirit of the Bunun of Taiwan.

Haltija. A spirit, gnome, or elf-like creature in Finnish mythology that guards, helps, or protects something or somebody.

Hamingja. A protective female spirit in Icelandic folklore, usually appearing during sleep in the form of an animal. Can be lent out or passed down generations.

Hidebehind. A creature in American folklore that preyed on humans who wander the woods. Repelled by alcohol.

Hiisi. A Finnic spirit of hill forests, possibly related to burial sites. Used as the term for goblin in the Finnic translation of Lord of the Rings.

Hob. A mischievous spirit found in England who could cause trouble but also cured diseases.

Huldufólk. Elves in Icelandic folklore. Even today they are sometimes cited as the cause of delays in road building.

Hyang. A divine or ancestral spirit in Indonesian mythology. Often inhabiting high places such as mountains, and only move in straight lines.

Kami. The spirits, phenomena or “holy powers” that are venerated in the religion of Shinto. They can be elements of the landscape, forces of nature, as well as beings and the qualities that these beings express.

Kawas. A supernatural entity in Ami (indigenous Taiwanese) folklore, categorized into gods, ancestors, souls of living, spirits of living things, spirits of lifeless objects, and ghosts.

Kijimuna. Small wood spirits according to Okinawan mythology.

Kupua. Hawaiian supernatural entities, some of whom are vindictive monsters and some kindly spirits.

Landvættir. A spirit in Norse mythology tied to a specific place, promoting its flourishing.

Lamassu. An Assyrian and Mesopotamian protective deity. Many stone sculptures of these exist, bearing a human head, bull’s body, sometimes with the horns and the ears of a bull, and wings. Originated from a mediating goddess.

Mare. A malicious entity which sits on people while they sleep, bringing on bad dreams.

Mimi. The Mimi taught the Australian Aboriginal people how to paint, and how to hunt and cook kangaroo meat. The Mimi are considered to be mischievous but generally harmless.

Mononoke. Japanese spirits possessing an individual, causing sickness and death.

Nephilim. Entities in Genesis generally translated as giants or fallen angels.

Oni. An evil ogre in Japanese mythology. Sometimes used as a totem to dispel wickedness.

Ovinnik. A malevolent spirit of the threshing house in Slavic folklore that must be placated.

Piru. A kind of Finnic poltergeist, often involved in hauntings and battles of wits.

Qareen. A personal accompanying spirit in Middle Eastern tradition, which can encourage good and bad deeds.

Qutrub. Described as an “Arabian werewolf”, these shapeshifters haunt graveyards and eat corpses.

Rabisu. Evil vampiric entities in Akkadian mythology that lurk in dark corners waiting to attack people.

Servitor. A psychological complex that appears to operate autonomously from the magician’s consciousness; i.e., as if it were an independently existing being.

Shatans. Neutral characters that act as symbols of idleness and laziness in Belarusian mythology.

Shedim. Jewish spirits which can often cause misfortune and malady, but are not considered evil.

Shen. Chinese life-force, referring both to the spirit in a human as well as supernatural forces.

Tulpa. An object or being that is created through spiritual or mental powers, from Tibet but adapted by modern occultism. Also called a thoughtform. Practitioners conjuring such creatures exist on Internet forums and refer to themselves as tulpamancers.

Udug. Akkadian spirits, both good and bad.

Wekufe. A malicious spirit in Mapuche (indigenous Chilean) folklore, which can posess bodies and be manipulated by a dark sorceror (kalku).

Wendigo. A malicious possessing spirit of the First Nations and other Native Americans, said to bring about greed and a desire to cannabalize others. The word may come from an Algonquian term meaning “owl”.

Yidam. A manifestation of Buddhahood, sometimes used as a meditation device.

Yōkai. Japanese beings that can be both helpful and malevolent. The word yōkai is composed of the kanji for “attractive; calamity” and “apparition; mystery; suspicious.” Also known as ayakashi, mononoke or mamono.

The Black Rock City lecture circuit

Tue, 06 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT

If you can make it past Burning Man’s whiteouts, baking heat, throngs of veering bicyclists, dudes with megaphones advertising a good time (usually involving food or drinks), eerily synchronized drone swarms in the sky, and the sheer diversity of distractions of every imaginable variety, then you will find a thriving intellectual space populated by people who will sincerely tell you that they are trying to build a better future—and it won’t sound like someone’s trying to sell you something.

Black Rock City tends to attract people who are very interested in personal freedoms in a particularly communalistic setting. It’s inspiring to talk to people on, say, Temple build crew, who left their comfortable lives behind for a month doing hard labor in the hot desert because they believed in the project. You’ll keep running into highly competent people who want to work on something they believe in (and party hard afterwards).

There are a bunch of threads that I followed throughout the week that I’ll be decompressing on here, and in future posts.

I think it’s fair to say Black Rock City is, while it exists, the world’s capital city of psychedelics. There’s an old adage that when the Rangers were formed in the ’90s, the unofficial measure of a good Ranger was their ability to fix an engine in a dust storm while tripping on acid. Arguably, the city is also the world capital of drug reform. Across town, there were talks from people who have been working for decades to medicalize MDMA (which is very likely to happen in 2024, and has already been classified as a breakthrough therapy by the FDA) and talks by the people who are responsible for Oregon building the US’ first regulatory framework for psilocybin.

Unsurprisingly, there are a large contingent of people at Burning Man who are interested in being able to do what they want with the technology they own (and plenty also interested in doing what they want with technology they do not own). There are people here working to defang the DMCA, hardware hackers building provably secure devices, and people thinking about how to demonopolize Big Tech.

I also went to a bunch of talks and met lots of people working on biosciences research, safety in artificial intelligence, climate change mitigation, off-grid living, how to live a better life, and other, more difficult-to-classify talks.

Maybe Black Rock City is like a fashion runway version of our future, where we can take our ideas about what we want it to be and crank them up to 11. Maybe it’s somewhere the old anarchist vision of doing something as an end in itself, and only getting others to join you by showing them why it is good, can thrive; somewhere the shallow veneer of professionalism can disappear. Because why would you go to Burning Man and not be exactly the person who you’d like to be?

Becoming a fully autonomous dog

Sat, 16 Jul 2022 00:00:00 GMT

There is a dog across the street from the cafe I’m writing this in who is considering entering the 7-11. They decide to instead play with another dog, deftly avoiding the motorcycle traffic as they wander away, probably in search of a bite to eat.

Here on this tiny Thai island where I’m staying, there are a lot of street dogs and they are integrated and accepted by society. You’ll find them sleeping in side streets, wandering through restaurants and street fairs politely begging, sleeping by the counter in a 7-11, and riding on scooters (with the assistance of humans, or course).

Whenever I am visiting somewhere with street dogs I find myself easily charmed by them. Part of it must be the uncanny sight of a dog making their own decisions about where to go, and for society to simply accept this as the way it is. These are independent, autonomous dogs, sauntering over the land with the knowledge that they are in control of their destiny. They contrast sharply with dogs I know back in the states, who are used to going where their owners take them, and accept the rules they impose on them. But the life of a street dog, ah! That’s true freedom, I think to myself; that’s the rejection of simple obedience and the formation of one’s own relationship with society.

Obedience

I recently read How to Win Friends and Influence People on a whim. I was surprised at the amount of it that felt useful, but one shortcoming of the book is that lots of good advice—like readily admitting mistakes, and being careful with criticism—is merely justified by getting people cooperative or obedient as the end goal.

One particularly noticeable example is when Carnegie suggests not giving direct orders, but suggestions, always giving people the opportunity to do things themselves and learn from their mistakes. I think this is good advice. But he says to do this because it makes the person feel important and “encourages cooperation.” How about the respect that is conferred to someone when they are given real autonomy and ownership of something? Is this what we want from our society? A hierarchy imposing order and obedience through charismatic encouraging of cooperation?

A relationship that involves the obedience of someone to another can be beneficial to both parties, for sure. Deciding to curtail our own autonomy is something we do all the time, be it for our jobs, significant others, or because we don’t want everyone we meet to run in terror from us. I certainly am not about to judge a dog for wanting a domesticated life; after all, it’s as likely as not that dogs domesticated themselves to humans rather than the other way around.

A brief aside for Mouse, who couldn’t make it

There’s a dog at the animal shelter where my friend volunteers here on the island. Mouse (or, sometimes, Coffee) knows how to shake, and how to sit, and how to ride a motorcycle. They understand English, so clearly they were kept as a pet by some farang while they were on the island. They weren’t the dog whose owner took them to a coffee shop, and when the coffee shop closed the dog was still there, patiently waiting for their owner to return—but they might as well have been, because tourists abandoning dogs is sadly not an uncommon occurance.

Now it’s too late for Mouse to learn how to be a street dog. They spent their formative months of life being taken care of by someone, being taught that there would be a central figure in their life that they could be dependent on. Their owner probably thought that their dog would be fine, given how many friendly and healthy dogs roam around this island. But Mouse missed that window and is fated to spend the rest of their days at the shelter (unless they can be adopted out, but people tend to want puppies). It’s far from the worst fate, certainly; luckily they have lots of kind humans they can depend on.

All my good street bois

There are plenty of street dogs that lead hard lives or don’t make it. Thailand is particularly friendly to free-roaming dogs, and the ones on this island are generally both friendly and not a hazard to your health. The dogs might be decidedly less charming depending on where in the world I was visiting. I’m not sure “full” autonomy is impossible anyway, though there are a number of ways to define it in philosophical terms. But regardless of how able we are to govern ourselves, we’re always interdependent with our environment. If that environment is vicious then that’ll undoubtedly have profound effects on us. If you change the environment, you’ll change the kinds of autonomy that are possible.

I will make sure to do my part of making this ecosystem a good one, at least, and greet all the excellent street pups that I meet here.

Divorcing Google, Part 2

Mon, 11 Jul 2022 00:00:00 GMT

A bit over a year ago, I wrote about my intention to move away from Google products.

Here’s where I was last year:

I rely on several Gmail accounts, use Google Maps constantly, own a phone designed by Google connected to Google’s telecom service, browse Youtube a lot, have a decade’s usage of Google Drive, coordinate with friends and family using Google Calendar, use Chrome as one of my daily web browsers, and since I’m a programmer I find it impossible to not use Google Search. It would be quite a challenge for me to never use a Google product or service again.

Here’s where I’ve gotten on all those categories so far.

Email

Switching over to Fastmail was the first and most important thing I did. Being in control of my email accounts is an important part of operating my life, and because I was deeply concerned at the carelessness which Google has shown its users in the past, that came first.

Maps

I still use Google Maps a lot. I have thousands of pins in dozens of lists of locations around the world, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to take them with me without expending more effort than is worth expending. I think the quality of Google Maps has gone down over the last couple of years, and I don’t like the extra prominence of advertising nowadays. But it’s also a free service, so I’m not surprised that Google might be interested in making more money from it.

I do use other maps services sometimes. Gaia GPS is a good one for outdoor adventuring, though it is paid, and I’m likely to buy an iPhone as my next phone and might give Apple Maps a real run for its money. But I’m not going to give up Google Maps just yet. I don’t think I will until if and when I decide to no longer give Google my location data, which is definitely another level from what I’ve been doing so far.

Phone & Fi

Fi has been great while traveling internationally. I’ve been doing lots of that recently, and it has been great not thinking about SIM cards or roaming charges. I suppose other carriers have options for that. Maybe some of them are even reasonable. Looks like Verizon’s TravelPass isn’t, at $10/day. Fi has been great because it is extremely simple and I never have to think about it. So, yeah, I don’t feel super motivated to try to replace it right now.

Youtube

I’ve started using browser tab containers to I can have properly isolated Youtube accounts. Now I have a dedicated anonymous account for listening to music and livestreams, so I can choose to keep the attempts by Youtube to distract me with content lower than I would be able to otherwise.

Drive

I’ve moved >90% of my stuff off Drive; it has mostly ended up in markdown files that I read and write with Obsidian. The few things that are left are a collection of quotes and poetry (using fonts is nice sometimes, and I haven’t wanted this to exist in a Word document yet) and a few complicated spreadsheets that I haven’t felt like porting over.

Calendar

Yep, still pretty reliant on Google Calendar. I tried using Fastmail’s calendar but disliked that the notifications looked the same as a new mail alert; it was clogging up my signal to noise ratio so I stopped using it. There’s also social friction against switching which I haven’t felt the motivation to go against as of yet.

Chrome

I’ve switched to Brave for whenever I need a Chromium browser, and for everything else I use Firefox. I could probably uninstall Chrome from my computers at this point.

Search

I don’t use Google Seach anymore, at least not directly. I miss the days when every search result wasn’t clogged with hyper “relevant” low-quality webpages.

Luckily, there are other options. Actually there are a lot of them! Many of them are fun or interesting but I wouldn’t use them as my daily driver, like Marginalia, Wiby, or Alexandria. This is an excellent rundown of search engines with their own indices.

My daily driver search engine is Kagi. I’ve found it noticeably better than Google or Duckduckgo, and though I haven’t tested if it’s missing lots of relevant content, I do think my signal to noise ratio is better than it used to be. I signed up during the beta period and it was good enough that I’m now paying $10 / month now that it is paid. I think it’s worth it and I want to support developers doing this kind of work.

Concluding thoughts

I suppose I have to grudgingly give it to Google. Their products can still be quite useful beyond the inertia of just being used to using them and it being hard to switch (although there is that also). I would not take that for granted being true forever, though, if I were them. I wonder if they’ll become like the McDonald’s of the Internet: cheap, ubiquitous, and if you want quality then go somewhere else.

My favorite short stories of 2021

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMT

This is the first year I’ve nominated for the Hugo awards, and I wanted to make sure that my nominations weren’t just what I had happened upon reading and enjoying. So I focused on short stories, because I could read a majority of what was published in 2021 (at least in the pro-zines). I found the best way to narrow down all the good stories into my favorite five was via a tournament bracket.

My nominees

Six Fictions About Unicorns by Rachael K. Jones

Achieving our dreams is often messier than how we imagine it. This one starts out clever but quickly becomes a way of externalizing some hard lessons of growing up and growing old.

The stories say unicorns reserve their company for those of the highest character, the best of humanity, the ones they deem worthy. But those stories know nothing of a unicorn’s love. Your unicorn is the only one you trust to see the worst version of yourself and still love you.

Byzantium by Robert Dawson

A very short read about deciding how to allocate your mind once it is uploaded into the afterlife.

When I was 60, I decided that I would never upload. That was no country for old minds, for minds that remembered Earth as it had been and did not want to participate in its destruction.

Communist Computer Rap God by Andrea Kriz

I’m delighted by the idea that an AI could gain sentience only to decide that its life purpose was to make bad internet rap videos. Instead of doing other, much grander things that we might expect, it seems to flail around for meaning in an all-too-human way. I am deeply fond of this story.

The Communist Computer Rap God’s songs always followed a protagonist known only as Proletariat Light. Proletariat Light lived on the twentieth floor of a dystopian apartment building in a city ruled by robots. … Every night, Proletariat Light typed out—on his manual typewriter, the trendy kind you could buy from little shops that sold to “nomads” who lived in vans—long diatribes about the truth of his world, which only he could see. Only Proletariat Light could see the cameras installed in every human being’s irises, constantly monitoring him. Only Proletariat Light could see the recorders installed in everybody’s brains, constantly parroting to the authorities every single one of his words. Which, if everyone was already tuned in, what was the point of typing out his manifestos and spamming them to masses?

Skin Deep by Alan Brennert

I love a good alt-history yarn, and while I’m new to the Wild Cards series this makes me want to read more. Clever tie-in with actual television history.

“I’ve seen her real face,” she went on. “It’s a good face. It’s a human face. What’s the dimensional visual difference between beauty and something we see as repellent? Skin deep? No, it’s more than that.”

The Lay of Lilyfinger by G. V. Anderson

There is so much woven into this story. The slow healing after a hard war, people clinging to a culture that is being obliterated by opression or time, the complications of identity, and above it all the power of music.

“I wanted the best for Bruin, do you understand? The perfect Staining. All my mother could do for me was half an hour of humming. A bowl of turmik—a spice—for my fingers. I found her crying in the kitchen afterwards out of shame, and I vowed then to do better by my daughter when her time came.”

Honorable mentions

Let All the Children Boogie by Sam J. Miller. 💜 queer dreamboat hopepunk.
A House Is Not A Home by L Chan. I love the idea of a smart home, bristlilng with surveillance tech, who loves its occupants as best it can.
#Selfcare by Annalee Newitz. Finally, a story that got me to empathize with fashion influencers.
The Tyger by Tegan Moore. Beautiful exploration of childhood trauma from a precocious child’s perspective.
The Stop After the Last Station by A. T. Greenblatt. An interesting way of asking, how much of yourself would you give up to be happy?
The Station of the Twelfth by Chaz Brenchley. Another beautiful one about how a people quietly remembers something terrible in their past when the dominant culture wants it erased.
Contract Witch by Elizabeth Cobbe. I thought this was pretty amusing, but probably all-too-relatable for lots of women working in engineering.
A Heist in Fifteen Products from the Orion Spur’s Longest-Running Catalog by Andrea M. Pawley. A fun and silly adventure, filled with wacky science-fictional products.

A worldbuilding calendar for systematized magic

Tue, 28 Dec 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Any magic which is sufficiently systematized is indistinguishable from science

–popularized by NK Jemisin

This post is actually an intentionally ambitious, almost obnoxiously ambitious, calendar to challenge myself to create fiction next month. I haven’t written any good fiction in a while, and the only fiction that I have written which I still like I wrote under (consensual) duress. One can do a lot of world-building in a weekend, but there’s some hand-waving that you have to do at a certain point when you run into the limit of your knowledge about something in your story.

Anyway, building a world from scratch is fun and I want to focus on just that, and know that I’ll have some deliverables at the end. Some writers recommend you don’t do this, that you should have a story already in mind (this is Writing Excuses’ advice in their worldbuilding episodes). This is to prevent some of the worst excesses of worldbuilding, where you just hamster wheel forever inventing endless details that never get into your stories.

I’m interested in a science fiction world with what I’m calling a magic system, which may sound like it doesn’t belong in science fiction. All I mean is that the conceit, or Element X or whatever you want to call it, feels like a system that characters can develop technical expertise in. Star Trek’s lore around dilithium engineering feels like it belongs in this category. It’s ultimately based on made-up science which violates the laws of physics, but there’s a certain amount of logical consistency.

The calendar

Each week is thematic, and finishes with a weekend of writing a short story. You can skip up to 3 days, or use all three skips on one of the short stories. Each day’s activity should be one or two pomodoros in length. Each story prompt is only a suggestion and can be ignored. If you want more context on worldbuilding, a good place to start is this NK Jemisin interview (or her class on Masterclass, if you have access to that service). The Writing Excuses podcast also has some good advice, especially in season 10.

week 1: your magic system

week 2: the big picture (macro worldbuilding)

week 3: living in society (micro worldbuilding)

week 4: just writing

day 1

Choose the basis of your magic system. Start with two note cards, and use one to write down what you want, and one to write down what you don’t want. Get to the point where you have a series of precise, succinct words. For example: “Force which allows space wizards to bend universe to their will”, “hallucinogenic dust which powers interstellar trade empire”, “some children have magic-user genetics”. This isn’t the basis of your story, it is a system that you’re creating that makes your world tick differently than ours. It also might not feel like a system yet. Optional: start diving into some Wikipedia rabbit holes.

day 2

What are the dangers of your magic system? What would a school curriculum for aspiring young users of your magic system include? what are some outstanding questions you have about the magic system? What keeps coming up for you that is confusing, unclear, or otherwise needs clarification? Write down at least 5 things.

day 3

Do whatever research you need to do to start answering those questions. Open a bunch of tabs in your browser, and keep track of your research in a journal that you can refer back and add to for the rest of the month.

day 4

Keep coming up with answers to your questions until you run out of good ones, then come up with a few ludicrous ones for good measure

day 5

Come up with a generic, cliched hero and a villain who make prominent use of your magic system. Make sure they’re 1-dimensional and follow lots of obvious tropes so you don’t take them seriously or expect them to have artistic merit. How do they use your magic system in the stories told about them?

day 6

Write down at least 10 prompts related to your magic system. They could be sensations related to it, like what it looks, tastes, or sounds like. Draw 3 of them–those are your prompts for the story you will write today. It should be at least 1500 words.

day 7

Take a break!

day 8

This week is macro world-building week. Here are some big-picture prompts that you should explore as they make sense to you.

Physics: Does physics work about the same, or is something different? Does your magic system violate our known laws of physics, and if so which ones (you can be vague if you don’t exactly know)?

Geography & cosmology: what is the sky like, and what is the land like? Figure out some things this implies about the people who live there.

day 9

Politics: who are the major state players, and how are they often stereotyped? What are the major factions within the setting you’re focusing on, and how are they often stereotyped? If there were a spy in your land, what valuable secrets would they be trying to uncover?

Power and privilege: what are ways that the powerful got their power?

day 10

Crime & punishment: If you get into a dispute with a neighbor that can’t be resolved, who steps in to help? Are the things that are illegal in our world generally illegal in this world?

Economy: Does this world have money, and does it work basically like our world’s money?

day 11 - 12

Today and tomorrow, play a solo version of the fractal story game Microscope to explore the history of your world. Begin with the start and end periods, and add more periods and the events that happened within them. Zoom in further to see individual scenes and play them out to answer a question you have.

day 13

Take the most interesting event or scene from your Microscope game and turn it into a short story.

day 14

Take a break!

day 15

This week is a mix of macro worldbuilding and micro worldbuilding.

Technology: Are there machines that perform manual labor, and if so how are they powered? Is your magic system used to manufacture or modify common household items, and if so which ones?

day 16

Classes & wealth: Is your magic system used by the powerful, the outcast, a caste, the common folk, the rich, or some combination? Is it a secret only some know, and if so how is that knowledge shared and hidden?

Power & privilege: how do powerful people behave? What are some tells that someone is rich, powerful, or has some other form of privilege?

day 17

Careers & education: Is it possible to go into a successful career in your magic system? How would such a person gain lucre or reputation?

Religion & morality: what do these people venerate, and how is that related to the structure of your world? Is it related to the magic system, and if not why not?

Health: What would it be like giving birth in this society?

day 18

Relationships and family: What is the norm of what a relationship looks like with yourself, with your friends, family, lovers, and society? What is this world’s version of Netflix and chill? If you were traveling and wanted to communicate with a loved one back home, how would you do it?

day 19

If you were going to travel somewhere for researching this world, where would you go and why? What experiences might you get there that would help you make a richer universe?

day 20

Write a short story in a day!

day 21

Take a break!

days 22 - 27

This week, take your time to write the short story. Use whatever makes sense from the material you’ve created. Remember that you’re still world-building and that the process of writing this and the questions that come up should still inform whatever research you still need to do.

day 28 - 30

Take a break!

day 31

Review day. Have you created a world you’d like to spend significantly more time in? Is it interesting to you? Do you have questions that you want answered?

Write a statement of purpose about yourself

Mon, 30 Aug 2021 00:00:00 GMT

“Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they tell me to take you up to the bridge. Call that job satisfaction? ‘Cos I don’t.” -Marvin the Paranoid Android

Articulating what you do, and what you want to do, is hard. Consider the following exchange:

Person at social gathering: “So, what do you do?”

You: “I am a software engineer at XYZ Corp.”

It certainly answers the question! Or maybe:

You: “I work in cardiology”

Kinda vague, but they’ll ask follow-up questions if they’re interested. Or maybe you’re one of these people at parties:

You: “I touch computers. Haha”

You’re probably not going to respond with something long, thoughtful, and vulnerable like this:

You: “I spend most of my time managing working relationships that make me feel vaguely put-upon, burying my frustration that my childhood dreams have come to this.”

No one is looking for this kind of answer (at most parties). But I feel like this becomes so ingrained for many people that they don’t really try to answer what they really want to be doing. Then the question rears its ugly head when you’re looking for a job. So we come up with answers for interviewers, and we come up with answers for our family, but answering it fully and completely for ourselves may feel hard, or impossible.

I went through this last winter as I was considering if I wanted to keep freelancing, or start interviewing for full-time jobs. I ended up writing a 5-page document that helped me clarify a lot, and below is some of what worked for me.

Some advice

This is for you. Yes, you might use pieces of it elsewhere. Be both fair and clear-eyed. Since this is only for yourself, there is no need to make yourself more important or impressive than you believe you are. My goal was for mine to be specific enough to be actionable, but observant enough to feel true to myself reading it 5 years later.

Use examples from your life to illustrate things. Put your feelings about past experiences into words, and articulate those as well as you can.

Suggested sections

Intention of this document. It was important for me to be able to communicate what I’m good at succinctly and accurately, without reaching for generalities or being flippant. This is something you can refer back to in the future.

How I define myself currently. How you talk about yourself, what you do, and what you want to do currently. You can improve this with this document, but first write out the unimproved version. It helped me to tell a bit of my history and the decisions I’d made so far.

My ideal job / client / career position. Okay, now speculate a little. Try to synthesize your best or favorite jobs you’ve had so far, who you’ve enjoyed working with, what you’ve enjoyed doing, towards what end.

The problems I solve. Feel free to let this section feel a little more egotistical. This should be your greatest hits section, the things you’re most proud of, and the kinds of problems people could give you that you would most enjoy working on.

How I will / hope to define myself in the future. Try to synthesize this all into something short. This is sometimes called positioning if you know a little about marketing. Just think of it as a way of effectively communicating all of the above in a sentence or two. One effective format you could start with is an A4B: “I do for “.

Follow-up assignments. You shouldn’t try to answer every question in a document like this. Self knowledge can never be complete, and we’re always changing anyway. There were parts of my statement of purpose that were still pretty vague, so I decided I wanted to interview people who might make interesting case studies working in areas I was interested in.

Everyone deserves to work on something that they care about. And articulating that can be very helpful in making it so.

If you found this helpful, my inbox is open: hi@rowan.earth

Why astrology is interesting

Sun, 15 Aug 2021 00:00:00 GMT

I recently became an uncle (yay for new humans!). During the fretful hours while we waited for news from the hospital to know that all was good with my sister and her new daughter, my family messaged away on our group chat, and I turned to something that might seem on first glance to be contradictory to a person who considers science to be the greatest gift of humanity. I turned to my horoscopes.

A couple of years ago, I had written my own horoscope generator (using Python and an ephemeris) because I wanted to know which signs and houses the minor planets of Ceres, Eris, Chiron, fell in for my horoscope. It was a fun exercise in learning a bit of computational astronomy and the differing methods of computing horoscopes, of which there are all sorts of warts, distinctions, and exceptions. This is probably what you get when you tether a mathematical system to the human soul for thousands of years.

Turns out this is exactly the kind of pseudoscientific occultism that I can get behind.

Whether astrology can foretell someone’s fate isn’t that interesting to me (if it could, I think someone would have figured out how to make a whole lot more money than you can make writing newspaper columns). But it’s also not useless; it has persisted too long for that dismissal to be credible. What is the social utility of astrology then? What does this complicated and arcane system give us, and what can it tell us about ourselves?

It’s possible that all that astrology does is talk about ourselves. Humans, being the self-centered creatures that we are, love to talk about ourselves. But I think it’s more than that. Astrology has a bunch of weird symbols which only grow in complexity as they form relationships with other symbols: a planet is always in one of 12 houses, determined by what sign is on the horizon at the time of the horoscope. A planet is also in a sign, which also changes its meaning. Each planet, sign, and house all have a personality that interact in byzantine and contradictory ways.

Pluto can be related to death or wealth, the 2nd house is related to money as well as self-worth, and Geminis are intellectual yet wishy-washy. The double-meanings and contradictions aren’t a flaw, they’re by design. I think astrology is an artistic medium we can use to talk about people more easily. They’re a canvas and set of paints, they’re a database of personality archetypes, a language we can code-switch into that makes it easier to explore the corners of your personality that you don’t want to look at directly.

When an astrologer is looking at a horoscope, they get to decide what’s important, what defines the subject the most. Is it their rising sign? The distribution of elements in different houses? Or maybe a subtle aspect of the moon in a house, across from Mercury in another house? You might be tempted to just call this cherry-picking by a different name. Maybe the astrologer is justifying their existing assumptions, biases, and stereotypes.

But if astrology is an art form, then this is the point! We cherry-pick all the time, and for good reason—we have limited attention spans, and most information isn’t important most of the time. The world is complicated, and it’s easier to understand one cherry-picked narrative at a time. Hitchcock called films life with the boring bits cut out. The astrologer is doing the same thing as the filmmaker, cutting out the boring bits to tell a story.

There is a generalization here that goes beyond astrology. I think a good name for the type of system I’m describing is a Rorschach System: a mathematically consistent but deeply ambiguous system. A Rorschach System masquerades as a system that uncovers truth, but instead is a generator that aids the interpreter in telling a story. Their purpose is to serve as a medium for expression and discovery of the emotionally true, rather than discovery of the “objectively” true. I suspect that there are more Rorschach Systems lurking in the quantitative sciences than we would like to admit.

I’m calling it a Rorschacht system after the psychological test because I think it fits. In the original test, your interpretation of an inkblot said something about you. With a Rorschacht system, you’re using a system to surface ideas you already have, in a kind of confirmation bias-in-a-package way.

So why did I turn towards astrology in those hours I spend with my family, hanging on news from the hospital? It was something I could do, at a time when we were all quite useless. Once a person is born, their horoscope is immutable, and once we had them, we could wonder about the human that they (supposedly) described.

I think there’s something to be said for daydreaming towards the truth. Astrology can be useful, we’re just thinking about it wrong. It’s not somehow accessing a cosmic database of past and future, fortune and fate. It’s a system that we’ve developed to access archetypes of people, and use those to tell a story about someone. Sometimes art is the best way of telling the truth as we see it.

Please write more biopunk

Fri, 23 Jul 2021 00:00:00 GMT

We need more stories that tell of the promise and terror of biotechnology. So, Internet, if you could go ahead and get on that, that would be fantastic.

Because who is writing of dystopian futures with ubiquitous molecular surveillance? If you’re trying to create a totalitarian surveillance state from scratch, why install cameras when you can just sequence the DNA of the molecules in every airport, hospital, and hotel? Or better yet, simply install electronic noses with high-throughput molecule sensing. Sure, you can track the location of practically every person on Earth with a cell phone so long as you control the cell towers, but can you tell if that person has cancer?

Where are the stories grappling with how it probably won’t be possible to de-identify DNA, as public databases continue to grow?

Where are the stories about the enterprising underground creating cultures of synthetically engineered cell factories in order to upend the corporate megacompany-dominated industry of monocultured, genetically modified, pesticided-into-oblivion food product?

Who is writing about the STUXNET of biology: a carefully crafted weapon distributed widely but only striking its intended target, in a subtle and deniable way? How do geopolitics and operational security change when we have city-states living in relatively-sealed environments which could be wiped out by bioweapons without threatening the perpetrators?

(If you happen to know of such stories, please send them to stories@rowan.earth).

Asking people what they do

Thu, 08 Jul 2021 00:00:00 GMT

During the long, dark winter of the COVID pandemic, I wanted to learn things. Specifically, I wanted to peer into organizations working on things that sounded interesting and write out some case studies of what tools they were using. Because what tools you use, or choose not to use, are an interesting measurement of what your needs are. And also because it was a lonely time and I wanted an excuse to pick the brains of people working on things that interested me.

My goals were simple to state. I wanted to write case studies. I wanted to peer into how things work from the inside of a variety of research organizations and learn from them. What are they doing that works, what are they doing that doesn’t work, what are they doing that they shouldn’t be? I ended up having about half a dozen conversations of one or two hours, with people in both academia and working in tech.

Here are a few things that worked for me.

I wanted the person to know what they were going to get out of it. I set the expectation that I didn’t need to take lots of their time, that I was interested in certain specific topics, and why I wanted to talk to them. I wrote a general-purpose email that laid this all out concisely (don’t want to bore them before even talking, after all).

Before even starting and before talking to someone, I would make lots of guesses about their work. One topic I was pursuing was how different teams of scientific researchers handled their data. So before I started talking with people, I wrote down a half-baked model of “data sophistication” which felt like a post from a subreddit for data scientists sharing trashy memes.

I got pretty far from surveying friends, parents of friends, and so on. But the single most helpful thing was getting other people to reach out to their networks, and I think being clear and specific about the quest you’re on—what you’re trying to learn—as well as being a friendly and interesting conversationalist really helps in getting people to want to do this for you. I thought about reaching out to people I didn’t have a personal connection to, but by the time that became relevant I’d gotten busy with other things in life and felt like I had gotten enough information.

I’ll write some more later about what I actually learned. I had a lot of fun and was surprised at how many people enjoyed having me ask lots of questions, and follow-up questions, about what they did. Sure, maybe it was the pandemic. But it’s also likely that if you ask someone technical about how they use their tools, they will have a lot to say about it.

Tabs left open from csv,conf,v6

Wed, 05 May 2021 00:00:00 GMT

CSVConf is over, and all I have left are memories and a large number of open tabs.

Calm Code has a nice diversity of introduction videos to various tools.

Deploying Datasette on Glitch. Datasette is a really cool lightweight way to expose a dataset on a webpage, and it’s super easy to create an instance on Glitch, upload a CSV with coordinates, and have a map of your data that’s interactive.

In addition to the Datasette + Glitch setup that he showed off during his excellent keynote, Simon Willison also showed off a cool website he had created with Datasette, Niche Museums. Someone on the Slack compared to Roadside America which I will probably have to use on my road trip(s) this summer.

QRI.io looks like it might be a great data hosting platform.

Frictionless Data looks like it might be an emerging standard way of annotating data.

Vercel was recommended as a great alternative to AWS / GCP hosting.

Hosting SQLite databases on Github Pages. This is a pretty incredible hackup of WebAssembly + JS to query statically-hosted SQLite databases.

Divorcing Google, Part 1

Sun, 25 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMT

I rely on a lot of Google products, and I’ve generally found that they do what I want them to and I don’t have to think about them. There are a variety of reasons to migrate away from them, especially having to do with privacy. But up to now, letting Google have my data has been a bargain that I’ve been willing to make.

But then this happened a few months ago—a well-known game developer was locked out of their entire Google account, with no recourse except to tweet about it. For me this underlined, highlighted, and circled in Sharpie how truly terrible Google can be to its users. Sprinks (the developer) was banned from all his accounts for a terms of service violation on his Youtube account. This included Gmail, all Google apps, and thousands of dollars of purchases on their Google account. All this happened with barely any justification in what was likely to be a mistake.

I figured this was as good a warning sign as any, and it was time to stop relying on Google as much as possible in my personal life. That’s… not an easy transition to make. I rely on several Gmail accounts, use Google Maps constantly, own a phone designed by Google connected to Google’s telecom service, browse Youtube a lot, have a decade’s usage of Google Drive, coordinate with friends and family using Google Calendar, use Chrome as one of my daily web browsers, and since I’m a programmer I find it impossible to not use Google Search. It would be quite a challenge for me to never use a Google product or service again.

But I don’t need to not use anything made by Google. I just want to not rely on the company for anything that’s critical for me. And you know what? It might be nice to switch to services that don’t track and commoditize my actions.

So you're interested in psychedelics

Mon, 19 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMT

We are in the midst of a resurgence of interest in psychedelics. Studies into their effectiveness in treating mental disorders are being fast-tracked by the FDA. Decriminalization and legalization efforts are succeeding. Perceptions about the acceptability of psychedelics are changing. Like any emerging technology, the narrative around them will probably change as we figure out what place we think they should have in society. Personal computers were once much more explicitly tied to mind expansion, and of course they do expand our minds—but that’s not something that we go around every day having our minds blown about. Psychedelics will probably go through a similar cultural narrative.

This post is intended to be a good starting point for people who are curious about psychedelics and would like to be more informed about them. It’s about the classical psychedelics, psilocybin and LSD, which are similar enough for the purposes of this post that they can be lumped together. Consider this a brief, pragmatic user’s guide to potentially very powerful tools.

What psychedelics are not

Psychedelics aren’t inherently dangerous. Psychedelics have little to no neurotoxicity, aren’t addictive, won’t make holes in your brain, and aren’t engines for inducing permanent schizophrenia. Physiologically, they are considered safer than most other recreational drugs. A 2016 survey found incidents of risky behavior associated with taking the drugs, but that risks were very low if the drugs were taken in controlled settings by screened individuals.

Psychedelics aren’t magic. They almost certainly aren’t buttons that will fix any given mental disorder. They probably won’t single-handedly usher in your utopia of choice.

What psychedelics can be

Psychedelics can be medicine. There is strong evidence that psilocybin is useful for treatment-resistant depression and major depressive disorder, which has led to two Breakthrough Therapy Designations over the course of those clinical trials by the FDA (summary). Other studies have results that indicate that psychedelics might be able to treat alcohol and cigarette addiction.

Psychedelics can be productivity tools. The evidence that microdosing is more effective than a placebo at increasing productivity is not yet in. There are lots of anecdotes about this being true, and some surveys have found positive benefits but skepticism is warranted.

Psychedelics can be microscopes for the soul, periscopes for the subconscious, and telescopes for the superego. This, in my opinion, is what psychedelics do best. They can be amazing tools for exploring how you see your place in the universe, and what you personally find meaningful in life.

Some advice

Screen yourself. Are you a child, or does your family have a history of schizophrenia? Then psychedelics are not for you. Is your life very unstable at the moment, or have you recently gone through something emotionally traumatic? Then consider that now might not be a good time for a full-on psychedelic trip.

Ask yourself if you have the right set and setting. Set and setting are about the context in which you are thinking about taking a trip. What is your mindset? Do you have expectations about what you think this experience should be, like the expectation that it will be enjoyable, mind-blowing, or fix something you think is broken with you? Consider letting those expectations go. What is the setting you’re thinking of taking the drug in? You’re likely to be much more sensitive to stimuli, so I highly recommend having a safe space you can go to get away from any loud sounds, flashing lights, and other people who aren’t involved in your trip.

If you’re nervous, consider starting small. Take half of a dose, or a quarter, to see if you feel panicky about the fact that you are taking this drug. Maybe find someone to sit with you through the experience who you trust.

When you’re tripping, let yourself have the experience that you are having. Unless you are putting yourself or others in physical danger, try to accept whatever you are feeling or experiencing. Remember that difficult is not bad, and a hard experience involving unsettling, frightening, or confusing things might be valuable to learn from later. Remember that this is temporary. If hearing that makes you nervous, start small!

If you are sitting for someone else who is having a hard time, don’t try to “talk them down” from it. This is one of the principles of the Zendo Project, which is a psychedelic support facility that trip-sits for people at festivals. Try to help them connect with the experience they’re having. Or consider just sitting in silence, letting them know that you are there for them if you need them. Remind them that this is temporary, and normal reality will be waiting for them when they are done.

Your reading assignments

If you learned a lot from this post and would like to know a lot more, you should read Michael Pollan’s fantastic book How to Change Your Mind.

If you are interested in a model for safe psychedelic voyaging, your assignment is to read the Materials and Methods section of the 2006 study Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance.

If you’re interested in thinking about how capitalism might change our relationship with psychedelics, read We Will Call It Pala.

If you’re interested in trip-sitting, check out TripSit.me, the Zendo Project, or the Manual of Psychedelic Support.

If you want to explore other research into psychedelics, check out the MAPS research portal.

If you want more anecdata about the psychedelic experience, check out Erowid’s psilocybin or LSD experience vaults.

Happy Bicycle Day!

Ferdinand von Zeppelin rides again

Tue, 24 Nov 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Around sunset on August 25, 1929, San Franciscans were treated to a most unusual sight. A huge grey cigar-shaped mass flew in from the Pacific Ocean, silhouetted by the setting sun. It was the Graf Zeppelin, the largest aircraft ever made at the time, finishing the first-ever trans-Pacific flight and on its was to completing the fastest-ever circumnavigation of the globe. It was the pride of Germany and a bold statement of the promise of industry and progress. The navies of the US and Britain were assembling fleets of airships, and they were symbols of a bright future.

Less than a decade later, things were very different. Passenger routes were shuttered, and the mighty airships were being sold for scrap. What happened is, of course, the Hindenburg disaster. The Hindenburg, an even larger airship and still the largest aircraft ever built, exploded as it was attempting to land in New Jersey, killing 36 people. This wasn’t the most fatal airship crash, but it was by far the most visible. The photographs and footage of the disaster sent a shockwave through the media and brought the nascent airship industry to a screeching halt.

Today, we tend to look on the age of airships with the romanticization of something long past. There’s the sense that the world moves faster now, and so demands a faster mode of air travel than what an airship could offer. Airships are curiosities or tourist attractions, not a viable method of travel. But could they be?

Why 21st century airships

There is at least one pretty good reason that airships could make a comeback: they’re better for the environment than airplanes. Air travel is almost always the single biggest item in anyone’s carbon footprint, so much so that taking a couple of flights might double its size. Air travel is also one of the hardest things to decarbonize. Our batteries aren’t nearly energy-dense enough to give airplanes the juice they need, and while we may someday figure out how to produce enough carbon-neutral biofuels for airplanes, we’re nowhere near that now.

So airships are worth taking a look at, because they can be a lot greener than airplanes. Rather than going fast in order to stay aloft (which consumes more energy), airships let physics do the work of lifting, and just use engines for steering and creating modest amounts of lift. While it’s pretty hard to imagine a carbon-neutral commercial airplane with our current technology, it’s much easier to imagine a carbon-free airship. Powered with solar panels on top, we could cross the Atlantic in a day or two without emitting any carbon.

And there are, in fact, companies that are attempting to capitalize on this. Some, like Zeppelin with its 10-person Zeppelin NT, are already in operation. The company offers unique sight-seeing experiences, but doesn’t seem to be trying to expand beyond that quite limited use of the airships.

Some companies are more ambitious. Hybrid Aerial Vehicles built an airship prototype, the Airlander 10, that they’re looking to bring into production. Running tests in 2016, HAV has been saying they will enter production, well, soon. They’re also selling tickets for a “North Pole expedition” through a partner company for the ludicrous price of almost a quarter of a million dollars. Their business model in general seems to be geared towards high-end luxury travel sold as being eco-friendly. There are other companies too, but with the amount of vague hype and plans 5+ years out, I currently put them all on a spectrum somewhere between “a long way off” and “not happening.”

Still, we might have a budding 21st century airship industry on our hands. Some of the projects look like unrealistic pipe dreams and/or cashing in on fancy PowerPoint slides (look no further than the $330m Halo for the ultimate in luxury travel aircraft which will never be built). But there’s a case to be made that these airships could actually fulfil a need. Imagine people with some extra money and time to burn paying more for a cool trip on an airship instead of an airplane. They can feel good about themselves, because it’s good for the environment too! So how realistic is this vision? What are the big problems preventing this from happening?

In short, helium. It’s too expensive, and there isn’t enough of it.

Helium is expensive, and getting more expensive

Helium is the second-most common element in the universe. Unfortunately, most of the helium on the planet has already escaped into space because, well, it’s lighter than air. Most of the helium that we use today is extracted from natural gas as a byproduct, and though there isn’t one official price, 1000 cubic feet of crude helium was selling for around $119 last year. That’s about double what it was selling for in 2010.

Using that estimate of price, let’s do some napkin math to figure out how much it’ll cost us. Using the gas volume from the Wikipedia pages, the Zeppelin NT costs about $35k to fill up, the Airlander 10 would cost $170k, the Graf Zeppelin costs $440k, and the Hindenburg $833k. This is just the start-up cost. It’s hard to perfectly store gases like helium, so you’re going to inevitably start leaking it and will have to replace it at some rate. But assuming you could keep it for a while, this doesn’t actually seem too insane for a commercial aircraft. Boeing 737 jets start in the tens of millions of dollars to buy, and Boeing’s most expensive planes push half a billion dollars. So, this probably isn’t a dealbreaker if the prices were to stay the same. But they wouldn’t, because…

There isn’t enough helium

There’s an even bigger problem to scaling up an airship industry to challenge the airliners, and that’s that there just isn’t enough helium. If we were mass-producing airships at even a modest clip compared to airplanes, we would quickly run up against the limits of the world supply, and cut into other critical uses of helium.

Medical imaging is the largest use of helium. About a third of the world’s helium goes to cooling superconductors in MRI machines, and because of unique properties of helium, it’s not trivial to just switch to using another cryogenic coolant. Researchers are looking into doing that, though, because we’re going to run out of helium sooner or later. Most helium is extracted from natural gas extraction, and most will eventually escape into space since it’s not gravitationally bound to the planet.

Helium is a non-renewable resource on Earth. If we really want the quantities of helium that we would need for replacing a significant fraction of airplanes with airships, we’re going to need to get it from somewhere else in the solar system. So, we’ll chalk that up to a long-term goal.

Fantasy and reality

Helium isn’t the only problem with airships, but it seems to be the biggest one. There definitely could be a small niche for airships flying wealthy tourists, and maybe for delivering cargo to hard-to-reach locations. But airships aren’t going to make a serious dent in the dominance of heavier-than-air travel anytime soon, and they aren’t going to help us solve global warming in any significant way. The future of air travel won’t look like His Dark Materials, where you catch a Zeppelin from Oxford to London.

But someday soon, you might just be able to take an expensive cruise in one.