Some new reading material that arrived recently.

• The Mars Review of Books Vol 1, Issue 1 print edition →
• Klara and the Bomb by Crystal Bennes →
• Terraform - Watch/Worlds/Burn edited by Brian Merchant and Claire L. Evans →
• An Immense World by Ed Yong →

Well, I guess this is a fresh start. If you’re wondering where all my previous transmissions went — long story short, this blog was one of several sections of my site that had content sacrificed after I lost my hosting service and we ran into trouble with the migration a few months back. I didn’t feel like it was worth the work to try and restore everything. What matters, is getting myself back into the habit of writing regularly. Even before the site went haywire, I probably hadn’t posted anything for months. Maybe a year?

And while I’ve had the itch to put things out into the world, Instagram — where I was most active online — has become hard to look at. At this point, it’s been over two months since I’ve posted there. Even prior to that, it was getting pretty sporadic. Wherever the hell that app is going, it’s starting to feel like something to move on from. Probably best to primarily share things here, in my own domain, where anyone who is interested can find it minus all the noise.

So, with that said, how about a status report?

Work

Still powering away at DataStax, where we’re taking a hard look at the brand and where to go with things next. Not at a point where I can really talk about what all is in the works though. But the company is doing well, in spite of tech’s economic woes.

—

Home

Mostly hiding indoors, as the heat here in Kansas has been consistently triple digits for weeks now, with only a few days of relief here and there.

Just prior to the rolling heatwave, I did do a little remodeling — as followers on Instagram know, I cleaned up an old 1950s/60s shelter that was under my back porch. Originally accessible via a manhole and ladder, in the 1970s the previous owner of the house dug a ramp from the detached garage and cut a hole through the block wall. But the whole thing was in serious disrepair when I bought the place. The hatch leaked. There were more leaks where they breached the wall. The original electrical was a hazard. So with my brother’s help, we fixed all that. And then, I maybe went a bit overboard. And turned it into "the bunker."

Funny, after that transformation, I had an electrician come out to put some things on separate breakers. I’m sure he thought I was nuts. He wouldn't be wrong, I guess.

Side Projects

The Speculative Identities site needs an overhaul, which is going to be a pretty heavy lift involving both design and development. I need to update the experience to account for some things I want to do with the content going forward. We need to move to the latest version of the CMS we use, since we are on an old unsupported version. And we need to move everything to new hosting. So we’re probably going to break a lot of stuff in the process of trying to fix it.

Prior to all that work, I also have a number of updates I need to make to existing entries, based on new info that was brought to light by some readers. I’ve been away from it so long, I really feel like I’m letting those folks down. On top of that, I still get emails from readers that are just discovering the site, telling me they love it and want to see more.

To do all this, I really need to get myself to a place where I can be in the office for personal work. I think the screen time associated with a full-time, remote job has kind of taxed me in a way that my self-employed design work didn’t. Feels like it used to be a lot easier to get away from the screen multiple times a day, to give myself a break. At this point, when my work day ends, I tend to close the MacBook until the next day out of exhaustion.

—

Recently Acquired

Still stacking books. Still filing away papers and ephemera. I’ve slowed down a little, but have lucked into some nice stuff. The latest, was a 1955 “Atoms for Peace” booklet published by General Dynamics and designed by Erik Nitsche. It even had an invitation to the First U.S. Trade Fair of the Atomic Industry still tucked inside of it.

Recent Reading

- Books

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow

To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change by Alfred W. McCoy

I’ve been on a history kick here, and these are giving me some new perspectives on things.

- Comics

EX.Mag Vol. 4

A limited-run 300 page mecha-themed comics anthology published by Peow Studio, with some knockout stories and art (all in 2-color Risograph style). I had pre-ordered it, but it still appears to be available in their shop if you’re interested in checking it out.

Griz Grobus

Simon Roy has been running comics over on Webtoons, which I’ve been getting a kick out of. These are stories spinning out of the sci-fi world we saw in his book Habitat (which I had a little back and forth with him about for Speculative Identities).

- Design

"An Archeology for the Future in Space"

A pretty fascinating conversation between between Fabien Girardin (Near Future Laboratory), Simone Rebaudengo (oio) and Fred Scharmen (author of Space Settlements and Space Forces), on their design fiction process for the Dubai Museum of the Future’s Level 5 exhibit, the Orbiting Space Station (OSS) HOPE, which gives visitors an immersive experience of future life in space. Set in the year 2071, they not only created objects from that imagined future, but a whole history and culture behind it.

- Film

Finally got a chance to see NOPE, which I really enjoyed. If you’ve already seen it (spoilers after the jump), there’s some interesting background on the UFO design here.

—

Ok, I think that is long enough for one post. Will try to get at least one of these out a week going forward. See you next time.