Of Science and Shitposting
Of Science and Shitposting
A retrospective review of the second year of Postcards From Barsoom, and thoughts on the strange path that brought me here
When I started writing Postcards From Barsoom two years ago1, I was in a pretty different place in my life.
At the time I was still thoroughly immersed in my career as an academic scientist, something I’d devoted over a decade of my life to at that point. There was a lot to enjoy about that vocation.
The money was finally starting to be decent, which was a first for me.
The professional freedom offered by that life was wonderful. I hadn’t had a boss in any meaningful sense since I was a master’s student; by the time I was into my PhD, I’d matured enough that my doctoral supervisor could check in on me every week or, in the last couple years, every month or so. He wasn’t so much telling me what to do as seeing what I’d done, giving a few suggestions, and letting me take it from there. That’s nothing to turn your nose up at, at least if you’re wired the way I am and absolutely hate having people tell you what to do with the irreplaceable moments of your short mortal existence.
Beyond that, there was the sense of discovery. Our world is fully mapped at this point. There are no blank spots in the parts that humans can easily get to. Everything is owned space; everything has been seen; everything has been done. There are no explorers anymore, only the accursed tourist. But in that line of work I really was seeing things that no human eye had ever beheld before, or seeing them in a way in which no one had previously looked at them, and using this to understand things about them, and therefore about the world, that no human mind had yet grasped. Oh, none of it was major, nothing earthshaking that would grab hold of the imagination of the masses – these were all footnotes in the grand scientific enterprise, of no interest to anyone outside of my tiny international collaboration. But that matters less than you might think when you’re working at the coalface of the unknown.
And yet, all was not well.
You’ve heard it all from me before, at this point. The rot of Didn’t Earn It, Demoralizing, Expropriating, and Infiltrating its way through our Demented and Enervated Institutions. That was the first thing I wrote about, and I’ve returned to the subject of the DIEing academy on several occasions since that inaugural post. When you’re an early-career scientist working postdoctoral contracts, this stuff isn’t theoretical – it gets shoved in your face, every day. It was particularly disheartening when I was trying to find a job at the next career stage up, as a tenure-track professor, and being told I had to compromise my integrity and compose a diversity statement first ... with the knowledge that in all likelihood I’d be nevertheless be passed over in favour of the diversity to which I had written the humiliating paean. For the record, I simply refused to do this. That limited my options to the few institutions that didn’t demand obeisance2.
Then there was all the COVID stuff – the lockdowns, working from home for weeks that turned into months that turned into years, watching my colleagues lose their collective minds, fighting with the university to try and keep my paycheck while also keeping the needle of eviljuice out of my arm. You know the drill.
I wasn’t in an emotionally good place when I started writing this. To the contrary, I was full of wrath, frustration, and anxiety. And that came out, I am sure, in the writing ... indeed a large part of the reason I put myself out there was to scream that emotional volcano out into the void, to finally express all those things that had been bottled up for so long. I didn’t care that much if anyone listened.
As it turned out, there were people who listened. There are far, far more of you than I ever would have thought. And you have no idea how grateful I am for that.
Writing on Substack has been lifechanging,, in numerous ways, all of them positive. A few years ago it would never have occurred to me that I could get paid for writing, well, whatever I want to write about, that there would be people out there who would actually give me money because they enjoyed what I write. That’s simply amazing. Every single one of you that has contributed has my deepest appreciation and gratitude. And yes, that includes those of you reading this who, for one reason or another, chose to withdraw your financial support – whatever your reasons, the fact that you supported me at all with your hard-earned money is incredibly meaningful.
Then there’s the emotional support. I’ve been a writer since I was a kid – I read a Larry Niven autobiography when I was in grade school, and decided then and there that I wanted to be a science fiction writer. I’m the only person I know who dropped out of a lit program to study theoretical physics instead (usually people switch majors in the other direction), and I’m also the only person I know who majored in theoretical physics specifically because he thought it would make him a better science fiction writer3.
People have always told me that I write well, although I don’t really think my prose is anything particularly special ... no one is as acutely aware of their shortcomings as a writer, as the writer himself. With the exception of a brief foray into the world of spoken word poetry, however, I never really put myself out there. After my undergrad I wrote a couple of novels4, which I never submitted. In retrospect it’s probably for the best: by the time I was ready to start writing in earnest, the publishing world had gotten eaten by Woke, as evidenced by the whole Sad Puppies fiasco5. I had no real idea this was happening at the time, having drifted away from science fiction as the offerings on the shelves of the bookstores had already become rapidly less appealing by the late oughts. The last decade or two in scifi has been something of an interregnum. And, well, not just in sci-fi; the first part of the 21st century has been a cultural dark age in general.
The point that I’m getting around to stating, in my usual long-winded fashion, is that having such a remarkable number of you praising my writing has meant a lot to me. It has been a vast boost in confidence, giving me the motivation to stretch my capabilities, tackling larger projects that require deeper and longer treatment, and experimenting with different writing styles.
Thank you for that.
I’ve also met a wide range of impressive and fascinating people thanks to this blog. Some of them I’ve been reading for many years, and having them reach out to compliment my writing, knowing that I have some small measure of their respect, has been quite the experience. Others I discovered here as they were building up their own audiences, and they have become close friends and comrades. Still others got their start in my comments section, or have told me that they were inspired to write because of this blog. It’s very difficult for me to think of something more humbling, as a writer, than that, especially when you’re quite certain that some of them are better writers than you are.
There were other sources of discontent with the academic life, beyond the contextual problems of ideology and medical tyranny, predicaments that were deeper and more systemic. A few days ago, I came across this video by the science YouTuber Sabine Hossenfelder: My dream died, and now I'm here. I’ve been vaguely aware of Hossenfelder for a few years; having first being introduced to her by a very feminist undergraduate student with a Future Is Female sticker on her laptop, I wrote Hossenfelder off as probably another lame Woman In Science with boringly conventional takes on both science and gender politics. I may have been a bit hasty in that evaluation: while Hossenfelder is certainly some variety of feminist, she’s explicitly opposed to quotas or other systems that seek to artificially increase representation in science. That’s not really the point of her video, however, which is a brutally honest retrospective on her own scientific career, one that she says she almost didn’t post, but which I am glad that she did.
Hossenfelder sees quite clearly the structural problems in academic science. She describes how most of the scientific enterprise has devolved into an elaborate and cynical combination of parlour game and financial scam. Principal Investigators get grants, in order for the bloated university administrations to rake off their overhead surcharges. In order to get grants, papers must be published. Since the PIs spend much of their time either writing grant proposals or schmoozing with the other PIs who may well end up on the committees that decide whether or not their proposals are approved, the PIs need postdocs and doctoral students to write the papers. It doesn’t matter if the papers are true, or interesting, or useful. It doesn’t matter if they advance human understanding. It doesn’t matter if they represent significant advances with profound real-world applications. All that matters is that they pass peer review, get a few citations, and can be added to the PI’s publication list.
This, I think, was really at the root of my disquiet when I started Postcards From Barsoom. I’m something of an idealist, but by that point in my career I was starting to realize what life as a professor would actually be, and the foundational dishonesty of what academic science had become elicited nothing but a great weariness and nausea within me. I was looking at a life of writing grant proposals, of sitting on proposal review committees, of travelling to conferences to hear the same old talks about the same timid, marginal, impossibly narrow ‘progress’, and of grooming students to go down the same ultimately meaningless path. All in service of the sordid imperative that the mediocrities in admin be kept floating in the unearned luxury of their warm ocean of overhead cash.
It was demoralizing, and I think my soul had sickened as a result.
There was this nagging sense that I wasn’t made for this. That life was supposed to be more than this. That I was off track.
And you, my wonderful readers, saved me from that.
Because of you, I’ve largely been able to put that behind me.
Because of you, I can see the possibility opening up before me of a life in which I never have to worry about grant committees or peer review or diversity statements or vaccine mandates or sensitivity training or any of that nonsense ever again.
A year ago, I wrote Isekai, as the one-year retrospective on the highlights of the blog to date, doubling as a handy one-stop shop for new readers to find my best work:
But another year has passed, much has been written, and it’s time to revisit the state of the blog.
For entirely unrelated reasons, reader
put together a script to scrape metadata from Substack pages, as a result of which I was provided with a rough word count. In two years of writing, Postcards From Barsoom has published over 400,000 words. That’s the equivalent of four long-ish novels. Obviously, quality is more important that quantity, but I was still a bit taken aback to find out how much I’d written in such a short time.In the year since the last retrospective, I’ve published 42 essays, averaging a little bit less than one a week. This isn’t counting the Write Wing Roundups, stylistically inspired by Social Matter’s This Week In Reaction feature, which I published on a weekly basis between April and August of 2023. Those were well received, especially by the authors whose work it helped to promote, but to be honest it was a relief to stop. Trying to read and summarize essentially everything that came out on Substack in a one-week period was exhausting, and was severely cutting into my own writing. Since then
’s New Right Poast has filled the niche, and he’s been doing an admirable job of it. I for one look forward to every one of his poasts.Of the 42 original essays, 4 were guest posts, which I began accepting towards the end of 2023. All of them were unsolicited; in all cases, I helped with the editing, and provided some degree of feedback to the authors before publishing.
My vague intention going forward is to put out one guest essay every month or so. It isn’t that I’m short on content ...
... but rather that I’ve realized these can generate quite a few subscriptions for the guest authors.
’s A Partial Explanation of Zoomer Girl Derangement has been the most striking success story to date: guest publishing her blog’s inaugural essay provided her with a big first-day subscription boost, in which she picked up as many subs in one day as I got in my first two months6. Currently there are a few more guest essays queued up. I think you’ll enjoy them. In fact, I know you will.Before getting into the essays themselves, I’d like to mention a couple of book reviews I did, for the launch of
’s delightful Professor Copper’s Tactical Primer
And for
’s first science fiction novel, Theft of Fire:
Both of these were successes, meaning that in both cases you, my beloved readers, came through. Elliott told me that it was the best first-day release he’d ever had, and while I’m sure this has something to do with the audience he’s patiently cultivated for years7, I like to think I gave him a small boost. In the case of the Eriksen’s book, I was informed shortly after publishing that they’d had their biggest one-day sales bump since launch day, and Theft of Fire climbed several places in the Amazon rankings; now, Devon got in a fight with a big-name tech guy on X around the same time, which certainly played a role, but I like to think I had some effect as well.
Speaking of books, some of you might have noticed that publishing has slowed down here a bit recently. This is partly because I’ve been serving as
’s editor for his upcoming work The Bushido of Bitcoin. Editing an entire book is, it turns out, a lot of work. It will be worth it. The Bushido of Bitcoin will come out soon, and I think many of you will enjoy it.Also speaking of books, a few of you have been bugging me to publish one. The most common request is for me to bundle up a ‘best-of’ essay collection; given the interminable length of my turgid prose, it is doubtless easier to settle in with old-fashioned paper, rather than try to stay focus while uncomfortably hunched over the obsidian distraction glass. So, that’s certainly a possibility. However, the fiction bug has been tugging at me again. It’s my intention this year to take one of my unfinished novels, polish it up to a readable level, and publish it. Hopefully I can balance this while continuing to publish quality writing here; after all, that’s what you’re paying me for, not for filthy sci-fi. Some long-time readers might recall that I disappeared entirely for a few months at the end of 2022; partly this was because I got sucked into writing the first half of the first draft of a novel. Of course, I didn’t have paid subs turned on at that point, so didn’t feel guilty in the slightest for abandoning all of you. It’s a bit different when you’re getting paid. So, we’ll see if my sanity can survive blogging and writing simultaneously.
Somewhat in the spirit of the Write Wing Roundups, and to help readers find the topics they’re most likely to find intriguing, I’ve organized the list thematically. I’ve put the two works that I think really stand out at the top, one my own choice for favourite essay, the other the one that has gotten by far the strongest response from my readers. After those two, there’s:
Experimental Schizosophy, where I’ve collected all my wyrdest writings on consciousness and so forth;
Cultural Futurism, where I’m mainly speculating on the social responses to developments in artificial intelligence;
Rare Political Meat, probably the largest category, where I’ve collected my more topical fire-breathing invective on various subjects of interest to those whose main focus is the culture war;
Political Philosophy, which is exactly what it sounds like;
Musk-poasting, where I have a couple of essays looking at our would-be private sector Purple Caesar;
UAP-poasting, which as the name implies concerns flying saucers and saucer people;
The three-part Depopulocalypse series, which examines the fertility crisis from the perspective of first principles, and on that basis offers some suggestions to address it at a structural level;
And finally, the collected DIEing Academy series, starting with the three entries added this year but including the full series back to Postcards From Barsoom’s inaugural essay.
Without further ado.
Oh yes and plz
The coolest thing I've written this year (in my opinion)
Pixel Valhalla
The best thing I've written this year (in my readers' opinions)
Experimental Schizosophy
On the progressive God, retrocausality, Langan's Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe, Indo-European cosmogony, and Nietzche's Eternal Return
Are the left and right wings of politics better thought of as the hemispheres of our collective brain?
Grappling with a power structure that has become so diffuse it is impossible to determine where power lies:
Ruminations on civilizational death, on the occasion of a death in the family:
Is consciousness something that emerges from the brain? Something transmitted from the brain? Or ... is there a third option?
Cultural Futurism
On the psychic benefits of limiting one's direct exposure to the public Internet, particularly for girls:
Which way, Western man? Will you be UBIomass, useful only for biomedical testing? Or will you retvrn to tradition, and become farmers of ecosystems?
Rare Political Meat
On Bloomberg revealing that corporate America simply isn't hiring white men (big post that got a lot of attention):
On the Bud Light Military (another big post that got a lot of attention):
On Bud Light itself:
On free fentanyl vs the demonized American leaf
So how did those Canadian forest fires start, anyhow (this was the first piece that got attention on Xitter, back before Musk banned Substack)
On the Irish finally having had it with the violent criminals the traitors posing as their government have relentlessly inflicted on them:
On the Texans finally having had it with the open border the traitors posing as their government have inflicted on them:
Thoughts on free speech during the first of the failed attempts by wokescolds to SHUT. IT. DOWN! on Substack.
Political Philosophy
Thoughts on the abortive ethnogenesis of Canada's United Empire Loyalists, in the context of the possibility of a globe-spanning Anglo civilization-state:
How much of our religious enthusiasm is just a cope?
Musk-poasting
UAP-poasting
The Depopulocalypse Series
The DIEing Academy
Yep, it’s one of those posts.
A lot of red states have been putting the universities in legislative armlocks over the last year and forcing them to drop the diversity statement nonsense, which they have, but I strongly suspect that this just means the ideologues are now simply expecting to find the required oaths of ideological fealty in teaching statements, without of course telling anyone they’re doing this, and simply assuming that those who know, know, and those who don’t, are enemies.
I reasoned that on the one hand, the lit program had nothing to teach me – it was too easy – and furthermore, looked like it would mostly be learning how to write abstruse literary criticism about books I didn’t particularly want to read, such as the terribly depressing modernist literature so beloved of pretentious English professors. On the other hand, I certainly wouldn’t be learning the principles of complex analysis or the solution to the Schrodinger equation on my own time, I’m much too lazy for that, I need to be forced to do math; but even without the cattle-prod of coursework to motivate me, I would certainly be reading and writing for fun. And I did.
They’re terrible, for which reason you will never see them. But also I have no idea where the files are.
If you’ve not heard of Sad Puppies, the incomparable
has provided a quick and very readable description of this era-defining conflict in the literary science fiction world.Nope. Not jealous. Not jealous at all.
Check out his Wee Havamal. A friend of mine just picked it up. He says it’s awesome.
From the author John C. WRIGHT:
“The most disheartening trend is the spread of the mental disease of social justice addiction through all the major institutions of the publication and media industry. Not just written science fiction, but films and shows and comic books are continually suffering spiritual degradation, castration of manhood, and lobotomy of common sense, defenestration of sound storytelling.”
These behaviors sound demonic in nature, not an illness, entering all aspects of education, commerce, and politics. Medicine as well.
They must be shamed and cast out with force. There is no other solution.
Ragnarok approaches, I fear.
It is much the same here in academia, with the main difference being that statements about how you plan to pay homage to the värdegrund (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A4rdegrund) are not just mandatory but also legal; indeed they are compelled by law.
Värdegrund comes before facts or anything else and is worse than DIE because värdegrund is so loosely defined, or even undefined, you will never know if you violate it or not, until your superiors tell you you have done so. The Wikipedia entry briefly explains the concept, but without any context or examples of how it works in practice - it is essentially putting make-up on a pig.
The day I was told that trying to be factual, objective and impartial was to pick the side of the oppressors, I knew my time was up - I was a heretic (every time I write that word I can hear the Grunts from Halo chanting "He-re-tic! He-re-tic!"; the brain works in wondrous ways) because I hadn't when challenged replied with the correct pass-phrase.
Dressing up in old army uniform sans insignia for "Rainbow-day" just crossed the I and dotted the T - apparently, army green is the wrong kind of green.
A point: there are signs that DEI and woke is now somewhat on the back foot. Don't belive it to be so; what is, is that they have finally met a little resistance and have been taken aback, shocked and outraged that resistance is possible. Now is not the time to celebrate a victory: the enemy's front-line is wavering - now is the time to increase the intensity of the attack and have units ready for breakthrough and encircle, plus raids deep into the hinter-lands where the depos are. Against an enemy such as the woke and DEI, static warfare and attrition must be avoided; the continuous never-ending grind is where they excel. The raid, the fluid front, the avoiding of pitched battles, and the always striking at the enemy using his own strengths against him must be the principles of engagement.
That, and no prisoners. No peace. No accord or compromise. Consider the woke and the DEI the human equivalent of Giger's Xenomorph: it's goal is to utterly destroy you because of how it's existence and nature is.
There is no common ground or cause with an existential enemy.