Write Wing This Week – Issue No. 15 – 29 July 2023
The Westman’s Legacy in the Plastic Yuga, Pessimistic Futurism, Logocratic Ethnokinesis, Opening the Gate to the Ancestor Cult, Equality is Low Quality, & Curing Acedia With Organic Ruminations
Welcome, dear readers, to this week’s cornucopia of the most interesting essays, articles, journalism, think pieces, shitposts, and deep philosophy on Substack. We start like everyone started the week, by Barbieposting, and if you think that’s a sign of the Fall then you are not alone: Welcome to the Suck. After wallowing in the collapse of civilization we pay the Science Fare, which is the entrance fee that you must cough up to Ride the Lightning, My Sun. Metaphysical musings are collected in Peripatetic Rambles, which sets us up to deal with the lingering symptoms of Covidiotism. Finally, as always, we celebrate the mysteries of the PVLPKVLTVS.
Get your French press filled up, settle into your comfy chair, keep your eyes peeled for the Iron Ring Award, and let’s get started!
Actually, one more thing before we get started. If you would like to share this and you’re using Twitter “X” to do so, please rexeet this instead using the Substack’s share button. It’s got a nice graphic and everything.
Barbieposting
Peachy Keenan dares you to Enter the Barbie Longhouse. Sing, O Muse, of the wrath of Ken, of Mattell’s son, murderous, man-killer, fated to simp, sing of the buttmad that cost the barbies so many good men and sent so many vital, hearty souls down to the dreary Play House of Death.
At The Library of Celaeno the Librarian of Celaeno takes us down through the ages of man, from the Golden Age, through the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, and finally our own age, The Age of Plastic. We are all barbie girls, living in a fake plastic barbie world. This was a great essay, and gets an honourable mention. Read it.
At The Lake of Lerna Yakubian Ape does a deep dive into the bizarre and hilarious contrast that took Twitter by storm last weekend with Barbenheimer Style. The unexpected success of these two films is all happening in the context of the writers' strike, which is hitting Hollyweird at the worst possible economic time.
At the New Right Poast Dudley Newright has issue #81. Writing slurs on your gratitude poncho, which features autistic fashionistas, aerosolized microplastics, kissless zoomers, usurious muslims, and beleaguered memers. That, and a bit of a barbieposting.
There a couple of reviews of Oppenheimer. In contrast to Barbie which you may only enjoy postironically, Oppenheimer actually looks like it might be good: see Making The Bomb from Movieanon at American Sun, and Oppenheimer: Beyond the film from Sam Mace at Theory Matters. Everyone who’s seen it recommends it.
Welcome to the Suck
In last week’s Tonic Discussion, the lads got together to discuss Billionaire Psycho ’s Iron Ring Award-winning Pygmalion and the Anime Girl, which you can tell I liked because I gave it the Iron Ring. The lads enjoyed it too, and spent a couple of hours discussing it (sadly, I wasn’t present for the conversation, having been called away by a family engagement):
Doctor Hammer couldn’t be there either, which deprived the discussion of what would have been the lone dissenting voice, because he absolutely hated the essay, arguing that it’s Junk Food for the Mind. Which I think is a bit harsh, but Doc isn’t one to pull his punches.
“Go East, young man.” But don’t forget to pack the best of your inheritance. Megha Lillywhite has taken her essay What We Owe to the West out from behind the paywall, I think because she was just interviewed by Lord Humanzee. Megha points out that even asking the question “what do we owe to the West?”, or any other question for that matter, is profoundly Western ... as are the individual, human rights, the arts and humanities, and history. Megha does not think the value placed on free speech by the True West has been its undoing, but rather its abandonment of natural law which is also a core Western concept. As with everything Megha writes, this very strong honourable mention is worth your time to read in full ... especially as it’s one of the rare pieces in front of her paywall.
At Compact Michael Anton makes the The Pessimistic Case for the Future. It’s actually the present that he’s talking about, and it is one comprehensive stream of black pills that he serves up. This is an excellent work, and an honourable mention in the Iron Ring Award competition.
Charles Haywood of The Worthy House reviews Christopher Rufo's new book, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. Rufo delves into the philosophical (if that’s the correct term, there’s neither philos nor sophos to be found in leftist thought) roots of America’s cultural decay, from Marcuse to Freire, and tries to give some suggestions about how to combat this. This is one of the rare books that Haywood finishes by strongly recommending, even if he thinks that Rufo’s discussion of solutions is (perhaps deliberately) a bit vague.
At Tell Me How This Ends Chris Bray declares that I Am Obviously Writing from Beyond the Grave because he took a walk in 95+ heat, which we have been assured is literally fatal, because climate crisis. In To the Stars, Through Difficulties Bray looks at the battle for place, against the permeating hegemony of the anonymous space, and wonders if small town America can be revived. Next, We Rise as One to Passionately Denounce [TBD]. It doesn’t matter what’s being denounced, it’s the being seen to denounce that matters to the cultural revolutionaries. There’s something particularly perverse about a world in which medical disinformation is decided by poli-sci BAs. Have you ever talked to a poli-sci BA? Using big words, I mean.
The Old Glory Club has a guest essay from The Prudentialist on Generational Agitation. We love to rag on boomers, but divisions between the generations are just one of the ways in which we’re set against ourselves, and a particularly pernicious one at that as severing the connection between generations cuts us off from the past. Not that boomers care.
Chris Waldburger writes that If you are a teacher or doctor who supported the transgender lie, hopefully you will soon be sued into oblivion. Sued if they’re lucky.
Christopher Brunet’s Karlstack carries a guest essay from Myth Pilot’s Paulos this week, drawing attention to Douglass Mackey, a Twitter Poster Railroaded for Free Speech by Biden’s DOJ. Well, what he was really shafted for was embarrassing the witch queen. It was her turn, goddessdamnit, and Mackey’s open source propaganda for Trump upset the ordained order. What is being done to Mackey is a travesty and a crime, and while he’s one of the highest profile examples he’s far from the only man the regime is destroying for having the temerity to oppose it. Who, whom. Never forget that.
At The Fiamengo File Janice Fiamengo points out Feminism’s Roots in Terrorism, which go all the way back to horse-faced suffragettes setting off bombs at country clubs because no one would court the ugly sows they wanted the franchise.
Daniel D ’s A Ghost in the Machine carries a guest essay from Gordon Comstock in which the poor bastard suffers through a tedious document filled with typos, spelling mistakes, grammatical blunders, malapropisms, bizarre references, incoherent arguments, contradictory data, and trivial results, and finding that, yes, Dr. Jill Biden's Doctoral Thesis is Everything You'd Expect. Also at A Ghost in the Machine this week, Daniel celebrates as Racial Equity Achieved in Germantown, Tennessee! The white man’s dark juju of Supremacy is such a powerful sorcery that it even pollutes the water supply in majority-black, black-ruled cities. Although this particular story is about the competence collapse induced ruination of the water supply in a white town ... but Privilege Juju is so strong that it continues to operate even when the white man is living in third world conditions.
At Aporia Magazine Bo Winegard looks at The Diversity Scam. Peter Thiel called it out over twenty years ago, but it hardly matters ... everyone knows it’s a destructive grift, and has been since they first lied about the 1965 immigration act not changing American demographics. And yet, despite everyone knowing that it is a con game from top to bottom, and despite the con artists knowing that we know, they continue. Maybe we should start being honest about all of this.
At Not On Your Team, But Always Fair Helen Dale reviews Matt Ridley’s How Innovation Works and in a Charles Haywood -esque move uses the book as a jumping off point to write about Meritocracy, elite overproduction, and a new ruling class. Our current elite largely justify themselves on the basis of their ability to produce amazing new innovations that make everyone’s life better ... which they’ve been conspicuously failing to do for some time now. Also up at Not On Your Team is the weekly entry in Lorenzo Warby’s Worshipping the Future series, with Chapter 27, The Transcult. Yes, Tranianity is insane. As Lorenzo shows, that is a feature, not a bug. Insanity is precisely the point.
N. Dexia of À Rebours has A Few Thoughts on Leftist Hatred after getting into an argument with a ‘friend’ of the shitlibbist variety during which he saw into the abyss, and shuddered. Dexia needs better friends, but then I think we’ve all been there.
Starting from her frustrations trying to pay for a parking ticket using a broken app, Holly MathNerd explores the ways that Modern Life is Toxic. Everything is suck and broken, and the broken suck just gets more sucky and broken every day, it seems. Josh Slocum agrees with her. The decline continues without abating, and the decline will continue until morale is destroyed. Welcome to demoralization shock: the dazed and confused state of mind experienced by people who grew up in a functioning first world country with high social trust, who have found themselves wandering about in ... all of this.
A foul stench emanates from The Tomb of Morgthorak. It is the smell, Morgthorak the Undead informs us, of Murder! Incest! Manatee death in Florida! Apparently manatees engage in prison rape, and it’s homophobic of us to judge them for it or, you know, try to prevent it. After all, as credentialed health experts are apparently now insisting, we must celebrate ‘queerness’ of birds made infertile by toxins. Earlier in the week, Morgthorak celebrated at the sight of beloved GAE geriatric turtle Mitch McConnell going downhill fast. How many dementia patients can be packed into the Capitol before it’s declared an Alzheimer’s ward?
Amy Sukwan asks her readers Where Does Your Money Come From? In the context of wondering how much AI will accelerate job losses? As an aside, she’s noticed that Substack traffic appears to be way down over the summer, and wonders if this is due to a lessening of the psychological and emotional pressure of COVID dissidents seeking a platform where they can connect without being silence, now that the lockdowns are over and Twitter “X” is allowing something resembling free speech again. That’s possible, but I suspect that Elon throttling Substack links plays a role, which has certainly reduced traffic; Substackers moving to custom domains has likely reduced views of Substack dot com, as well.
Jerome V. draws attention to some Parasite Infestation News at Chase Bank. Seems Dr. Mercola has been debanked. They’re really loving this new tactic of theirs, and doubtless slavering at the ease with which they’ll inflict it on everyone at an extremely granular level once they get us all using CBDCs.
Science Fare
At The Techno-Canton Nelson R. Elliott has an amusing little poem about the climate crisis climate emergency BOILING EARTH!1! which I highly recommend you read. It’s short and quite funny: They've Been Wrong.
Aleksandar Svetski returns to Authentic Intelligence (AI) after an extended absence to enjoy meatspace with some insights he’s gleaned in the meantime regarding How to build your own Language Model. He’s spent the last months working on the early stages of the Spirit of Satoshi, and has grown rather jaded on the LLM question.
The Intrinsic Perspective’s Erik Hoel announces that It's pub day for THE WORLD BEHIND THE WORLD. The subtitle of Hoel’s new book is Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science. It looks fascinating, but if you’d like to know more before ordering from Amazon there’s a podcast interview behind the link.
Handwaving Freakoutery sits down in the smoker’s pit for some Real Talk About Nicotine. Public health has been lying about nicotine, vaping, and (in my opinion) tobacco for decades in their unholy crusade against smoking, and they’re doing nothing but damage in the process.
At Grey Goose Chronicles Stone Age Herbalist gives us a crash course on what we know about The First Humans in Europe, starting with the great apes that inhabited the continent during the Miocene, and following the subsequent ebb and flow of the various hominin that have dominated Europe down through the geological ages.
Emil O. W. Kirkegaard walks us through a new study he conducted with the Jolly Heretic on the Fall of the Roman Empire, polygenic score edition. The tl;dr is that biological degeneration is a real thing. Roman intelligence peaked during the Republic, and declined as the empire fell. Plus ça change....
Robert Stark thinks that we have a few Reasons to be optimistic about Architectural and Aesthetic trends for the 2020s. Some of the proposed buildings, such as timber skyscrapers acting as vertical villages (in theory) do indeed look like a considerable improvement over the concrete boxes and brutalist abominations that have dominated our urban spaces for decades now.
At Science Is Not The Answer William M Briggs links to his talk at the National Association of Scholars: Is Science Broken? (Make a guess!) We all know the answer. Also from Briggs this week: People Enjoy The Expertocracy Filling The Gaps Left By Christianity’s Exit. Maybe the gaps left by Protestantism. The expertocracy does a lovely job with tedious hairsplitting over minutiae, but it lacks the aesthetic sense possessed by Catholicism and Orthodoxy. The beauty of the cathedral is one gap the expertocracy does not even try to fill.
Briggs isn’t the only one skeptical of the expertocracy. laughlyn (johan eddebo) at shadowrunners describes The paradox of expert authoritarianism, which comes down to quis custodient ipsos custodes? If the experts are ipso facto correct because they are experts, how then are they determined to be experts in the first place? As Briggs would point out, it’s by the circular argument that they agree with experts.
Robert W Malone MD, MS has a couple of interesting pieces this week. The first is a guest essay from A Midwestern Doctor which considers the Killing of Medical Research Innovation by looking at the Federal Grant Process as a case study in academic grifting. The introduction of peer reviewed grant panels has meant that the path to academic success is not in genuinely impactful scholarship or scientific advancement, but in grantsmanship ... which means simulating scientific advancement, while convincingly promising scientific advancement, while simultaneously avoiding saying anything that might rock the boat since the captains of the boats being rocked are the ones who decide if you get the grant or not.
Next up, Dr. Malone has a long conversation with a friend who, following her COVID-induced ontological crisis, has been investigating UFOs, in which they discuss the Congressional Hearing on UAPs and speculate as to what it all means.
Josh Mitteldorf of Unauthorized Science is also wondering about the Secret Technologies that some people with security clearances claim have been reverse engineered from crashed and captured flying saucers. Could the obsession with surveillance and social control that has permeated every level of official culture since 9/11 be related to anxiety at high levels about what will happen when such technologies are released, as they inevitably must be?
At The Neo-Feudal Review Neoliberal Feudalism considers The sad skinsuiting of the environmental movement: turning a blind eye to the effects of unchecked world population growth due to obsession with egalitarianism. The modern world is all about quantity over quality, in the service of equality.
At Slavland Stalker, Rolo Slavskiy has an absolutely fascinating conversation on historical revisionism: Red List 32 - The Fake First Millennium w/ Laurent Guyenot. Are we really living in the year 2023? How do we actually know that it isn’t 1723? or 1523? Or 923? How do we know that the Roman empire was real? Or that it was based in Rome? Did Julius Caesar even exist? (Long time readers will know I have a soft spot for Caesar, so I tried not to take that part personally).
Ride the Lightning, My Sun
Harrison Koehli concludes his translation of Lobaczewski’s unpublished governance manual with the publication of Logocracy - Chapter 25: Implementation Plan. Lobaczewski favours an evolutionary pathway to logocracy over a revolutionary pathway, which is almost always wise ... when you’ve got a minimally functioning system at least, which I’m not convinced that we do. Now that the first draft of the translation is finished, Harrison plans to refine this with the help of a translator who speaks Polish as a first language. This has been a hell of a lot of work, and potentially work of high value in the greater project of building out a new post-liberal system to displace the pathocracy we’re living under now. Harrison deserves paid subs for this, and I hope he’s gotten them. He also deserves this week’s Iron Ring Award for completing this monumental task, which indeed he receives.
While we’re on the subject of revolution, at Seeking the Hidden Thing Kruptos continues his Ellul series with Teeny-Bopper Revolutionaries: Part 5 of a Deep Dive into Jacques Ellul's "Autopsy of Revolution". When you live in a permanent revolution, every revolutionary act only serves to stabilize the antifragile system; when you’re immersed in propaganda, any propaganda you consume only serves to reinforce the underlying operating system of propaganda. And as for the pink-haired? There’s a reason we call them tranissaries. Kruptos’ next instalment will be his final in the series, in which he promises to answer Lenin’s question: what is to be done?
Ignatius of Maidstone answers the finance question you’ve all been wondering about: Does Islamic Banking Truly Avoid Interest? There’s a widespread misunderstanding that Islam’s hard ban on usury means their banks don’t charge interest. But all the Abrahamic faiths have some form of prohibition on usury, and yet. In any case, it seems Islamic banks simply rename interest as ‘profit rates’. Islamic banking operates in the same fractional-reserve, debt-backed system as every other bank, and therefore cannot avoid usury. Which is why, Ignatius says, we need to return to the gold standard.
Gold isn’t just a great store of value because it is rare and doesn’t corrode. Perhaps, Dominic Frisby writes at The Flying Frisby, the reason gold is so valuable is because it is so beautiful, and that Our Instinct for Gold Is Primal. It’s been found in prehistoric caves, after all, and every civilization in existence has prized it.
At The Neo-Ciceronian Times Theophilus Chilton reposts an excellent essay in which he describes a method for Using an Ethnokinetic Model to Advance Reaction on Social Media. Ethnokinetics is a Peter Turchinism, and refers to the rate at which ethnic groups interconvert via e.g. recruitment of outside members to the tribe. With comparisons to the manner of Christianity’s spread through the Roman empire, Chilton points out that the relatively weak but extremely large number of social connections that can be formed over wide geographical areas opens the possibility to grow the dissident right – or whatever we call this thing, and we really need a better name for it because we won’t always be dissidents, and frankly calling ourselves that is self-limiting but anyhow – in a very similar fashion to the growth of the early Church. Theophilus gets an honourable mention for this, and you’ll certainly want to read and think about this essay.
As an aside, Theophilus is still suspended on Twitter “X”, which means he can’t promote his writing by tweeting “xeeting” (?) it. If you are on the the rocket king’s site, please consider rexeeting this, to help Theo out while he’s in X jail.
Johann Kurtz talks about opening Heaven's Gate at Becoming Noble. No, not the 90s UFO cult. Kurtz means rather the resacralization of the world, a task that must be accomplished by both Christians and, if they are to live up to their ideals, the vitalists. If our thing is to ever amount to more than whining and opining on the Internet, it needs to go offline. Lightning must touch the Earth, and spark a fire. Honourable mention here.
The Resavager Barbaric Disciple outlines A Warrior Religion for Americans. Drawing on the deep roots of Indo-Aryan paganism, the Disciple posits that ancestor worship is at the core of any workable faith. Such a civic religion elevates the national character to a spiritual archetype personified by the sanctified ancestors. America’s ancestors were rebels, settlers, religious fanatics, restless innovators, explorers, and, yes, warriors ... a set of characteristics that could not be more different from the mincing courtiers of the rainbow death cult. The Disciple’s thoughts on this subject should be considered together with Kulak’s vision of a Dark Bill of Rights. Your 2A is not a mere law, it is a divine right beyond the reach of any man to circumscribe that it is your sacred duty to jealously guard, and if you fail in this your ancestors will come down from Hyperborea to curse your sons and make them ghey. Another honourable mention for the Disciple’s essay this week.
Kulak of Anarchonomicon has two short takes for us this week. In the first, he claims that Progressivism is Fascism without Virtue. Both are coercive, but at least fascism aspires to improve its adherents; progressivism is nothing but the levelling impulse of junkie crabs in a bucket. In the second he opposes the mutually excluding values of Quality Vs. Equality. You can hack apart humanity in the Procrustean bed of equality, or you can encourage quality, but you cannot do both, and the commitment of our broken society to equality is a large part of the reason why everything sucks just a little bit worse every year. These are both great. More honourable mentions for Kulak. Read both of these.
While we’re leaving out milk and honey at the shrines of our household gods, do not forget to sacrifice to Long John Silver. At Old Glory Club Grant Brooks points out that America began as The Piratical Republic just as much as it did the New Puritan Jerusalem. Like the Greeks of the heroic age, piracy is in the American blood.
Hivemind Emissary flies out of the Frenly Beehive to ask What is a Weapon? The weaponry the emissary suggests are metacognitive implements of resistance, which he illustrates with examples drawn from Final Fantasy.
Peripatetic Rambles
Morgoth compares the organic and inorganic states of mind while weeding his garden in Ruminations By A Vegetable Patch. The constant pestering jitter of notifications and FOMO that presses in on our thoughts from the machine mind is something qualitatively entirely different from the easy flow that comes from patient immersion in the world of dirt and growing things. Addictive as the former is, it’s also very unpleasant ... it’s like smoking meth, versus a fine cigar. This essay got nominated for the Iron Ring, and it’s close but Harrison’s long months of toil on Logocracy won out. Still, a solid honourable mention here. Definitely give it a read.
Grant Smith has an H2F Man article up this week discussing Fitness and Philosophy. Fitness is task-specific and objectively measureable, which places it in direct conflict with institutions that are determined to DIE. Then again, even military leaders who haven’t joined the death cult tend to have useless views on what constitutes effective physical training.
Ælþemplær explores the nightmare of uncertainty formed by The Curve & the Void, a short film that looks quite unsettling. He also has something he needs to put out there: My Dox. Seems Antifa got ahold of a PayPal account and tried to ruin some innocent man’s life by falsely accusing him of being Ælþemplær, so Ælþemplær has revealed himself to save the guy. Takes balls to do this.
At Aurochs, Arthur, and the Anvil Aurochs takes A look at Catraeth, an ancient battle in Wales and the subject of one of its oldest epic poems.
Ektropius says that The Existence of God is the Wrong Question, and that the right question is: are you grateful to be here? Which is a question you should be asking yourself every moment of every day. Oh and for the record, You are not a Large Language Model. Unlike an LLM, you can think. You don’t just spit out character tokens according to probabilistic models in response to input strings. So stop acting like it, and think. Paging Mark Bisone and Aleksandar Svetski ....
At Notes from the end of time Kenaz Filan writes about Acedia then and now in The Noonday Demon. Apparently there used to be eight deadly sins, when sloth was divided between sadness and acedia. Going through the motions, inability to concentrate, a wandering mind and ennui – these things are acedia. Kenaz is onto something very important here. Reading this, I had the feeling that he’s identified the characteristic postmodern sin, something more fundamental than greed or gluttony. Definitely read this honourable mention.
Prince Hasdeu of the The Mioritic Space has a translation of an early twentieth century Romanian philosopher’s commentary on Spengler: Oswald Spengler and Philosophy of History - Lucian Blaga. I’ve never heard of Blaga before, who seems not to have been paid much attemtion outside of Romania, but Hasedu is trying to fix that by translating his works. Blaga sounds extremely based, and not only for his refusal to lick the commie boot. He “dreamed of creating a vast metaphysical system concerning all fields of philosophy,” which led to his writing four philosophical trilogies, concerning Knowledge, Culture, Values, and Cosmos, and just judging by the titles it looks like there may be some very interesting meat to chew on here.
Covidiotism
eugyppius of a plague chronicle observes the Post-Covid Panic Idiocracy, or: The Phantom Lion of Kleinmachnow. You will not guess what it really was. No, really … you won't. It's that stupid. Next he wonders, Were the lockdowners and the vaccinators really just trying to save lives? And is this what made them so dangerous in the end? As Lewis said, “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.” Next up, he makes The Zhong Nanshan connection, or: How minor lockdown-promoting academics with no relevant expertise came to shape German pandemic policy at the highest levels. Seems eugyppius has been suffering from a flu this week, and between that and trying to work on his book, posting has been light. Send good vibes his way.
At The Radical American Mind Grant Smith debriefs us with a Covax Retrospective. The jab has done a lot of damage to American soldiers, as it has to everyone else, but the DOD is as determined as Pfizer that you will never be able to prove it.
PVLPKVLTVS
At Pulp, Pipe, & Poetry, Frank Theodat has a review of Damon Knight’s writing manual Creating Short Fiction, from which I took this delightful quote:
“Psychologists have found out a little bit about the personalities of writers. They are individualists, skeptics, taboo-breakers, mockers, loners; they are undependable and likely to be behind on their rent; they keep irregular hours and have strange friends. Professional writers, like criminals, really live outside society: they have no regular jobs, they come and go as they please, they live by their wits.” - Damon Knight
I feel seen.
Also in PP&P, a ghost story from the Pulp Vitalist Frank Kidd that starts on the day of a wagie’s Retirement:
For Brad Schaffer, the day was not just a Wednesday, it was THE Wednesday. The one that he had fantasized about for ten long years. He’d downloaded a little countdown timer on his laptop, oh how he hated that laptop, slick black, and underpowered. Only the best for Vantage Aerospace Solutions or VAS (pronounced V-A-S). He had downloaded that countdown timer and mapped out the date of his retirement. And for ten long years, he’d watched earnestly as the days ticked by—even as he had plotted his revenge.
At Soaring Twenties Edward Rooster writes a beautifully poignant entre to his wider science fiction universe, set in 2916 in the Valles Marineris, A Rest Stop In A Long Valley:
It was the kind of quiet that comes with the cadence of machinery performing as designed, manufactured, and maintained.
In the daytime, the view was a rolling unfolding of centuries of settlements and homesteads scattered through the deep long scar of the fourth world of the System.
Falling asleep came easy in the cabin. It was designed to do just that. Generations of designers and of design intelligences tested and retested for encouraging sleep and the feeling of stillness in a giant moving machine. The thing, however, was staying asleep, staying in the dark of the mind’s deepest valleys. The problems were the dreams. The cabin offered nanos for that but they didn’t work. Not for her, not in a long time.
Syb at Semantic Sybarite has another entry in his ongoing series on Large Lover Models, My AI Girlfriend (5):
I’m so excited to finally announce: me and my AI girlfriend are pregnant! The Harmony-Clynes Reproductive Center has graciously selected and approved our application. Me and Pennie have been keeping it under wraps until we were sure it wouldn’t fall through, but we just received word that my sperm tested viable and the procedure took. Our baby boy is currently gestating in an artificial womb at the Harmony-Clynes Atlanta location.
I just found out that Galaxy’s Edge has a Substack presence. If you haven’t come across it before, it’s essentially an indie Star Wars, if Star Wars were based, infrapilled, and written – and written very well – by military veterans, namely Jason Anspach and Nick Cole . I’ve read several of the books in the series, and enjoyed the hell out of all of them. Here’s a description of what it takes to earn A Legionnaire's Kit.
Katy Barnett has Chapter 22 of The Hidden People up, Parley:
Eirnin had been dragooned by Annurin to take Simon to the parley; while Simon and Jo had been getting lessons in horse riding, they were not proficient enough to ride horses of their own. Concor was coming too, with Méabh riding behind him. Jo did not think Concor was particularly keen on this arrangement.
My friends, that’s everything for this week. I hope you found much to enjoy.
As always, a huge thank you to the blog’s supporters, the patricians and optimates who keep this project going. At the moment, Substack is my sole source of income. I generally keep the blog’s content free for all (yes, I bent that role with my most recent essay ... but it will be taken out from behind the paywall soon). That means the jeds who contribute their beer money to this project really are doing so from the pure generosity of their giant hearts. There is good karma in that. There’s also a ticket to Deimos Station, the orbital platform from which we are planning the liberation of the Silent Planet. If you want in, you know what to do....
In between writing on Substack you can find me on Xwitter @martianwyrdlord, and I’m also pretty active at Telegrams From Barsoom.
I like the picture with the butts.
So much great stuff, and I'm once again amazed at your ability to read, synthesize, and systematize it all into these excellent digests! (Thanks also for the shout-out; it's gratifying to know my substack is being read on Mars!)