December 2023 Newsletter
Hello. It has been so long since I’ve done a full newsletter (rather than just sending out some of the individual Modern Mythology articles) that you may not remember the list.
That’s because I’ve been wrestling with how I should best manage things in the back of my head for so long. In terms of the Newsletter— should I split my various interests and focuses across various feeds, channels, accounts, or just embrace the ADHD and use it to track whatever has my attention that month? Should I use it only for major releases and updates?
I’m going to make the call and go with the “top of my mind” approach, despite the fact that it might mean blending articles I’ve been reading and important happenings in the world with roleplaying games and music production in the same message. Welcome to my brain, I guess.
Things I’m Thinking About:
Closing out the year, obviously the increase in conflicts of a type and ferocity unprecedented in recent history has been on my mind a lot lately. I’ve had conversations throughout the year with various people about “why this is happening”, and it’s been clear to me that thinking about these things systemically is a real challenge for many, because it pushes against so many of the narrative structures we’ve grown up with. I shared some thoughts about this here last year, as an early attempt at discussing how desperately we all need to get out of a single linear cause mindset. That is, ‘this thing over here caused that thing over there, or it didn’t.’
A number of my other ‘thought experiments’ over the past twelve months have been in this direction, now that I look back on it. I’ll share a few below. The rest are mostly about the intersection of narratives and gaming, which I’ll share after that.
This is all just a little bit off the top, because getting into the weeds with this stuff might get quite long.
27 Premises, Silent Assumptions to Drive Systemic Thinking
I’ve recently embarked on a little experiment: distilling the fundamental principles that can lead to intuitively thinking in terms of systems and less in terms of individual agents.
This was not just for my own edification, but also to test how well a GPT model, armed with these principles, can be useful for early outlining and reflecting ideas back to me. I’ve set it up and given it specific parameters in GPT-4. You can see and test this for yourself here.
AI: What Kind of Smart is it?
Speculations about embodiment and consciousness, AGI, problems with even knowing what we are talking about when we say “intelligence”, much less “consciousness”… and just how weird might a speculatively self-aware AGI be? check it out.
There are a few videos and notes that didn’t make it into that article, or that seemed worth noting right off:
The advancement of neuromorphic chips, like Rain Neuromorphics’ fully analog AI circuit, is an intriguing direction, as are the ‘fungus chips’, although I’m more dubious about that direction. This technology, touted as a thousand times more energy-efficient than current processors, claims it could revolutionize our approach to AI’s energy consumption and scalability. John Koetsier’s Article
I imagine it’s still early days yet, and don’t share this so much for the individual case so much as that the very existence of this as a problem to solve is demonstration of one of my central premises in the article.
More prosaically, reducing the power cost is going to be one of those absolutely necessary scaling factors — and in terms of how to go at that, thermodynamics clearly has its limits, but there are probably many novel ways to reduce “process per kilowatt”. Particularly if there is a continued desire to integrate the technology locally, as well as through cloud processing.
Jaron Lanier’s perspective on AI’s future, though often orthogonal to my own, is always insightful. His views provide a unique lens through which to consider the trajectory of AI and its societal impacts.
Jaron Lanier’s Talk (video)
Ilya: the AI scientist shaping the world
Ilya’s Discussion (video)
The situation with Ilya and at OpenAI/GPT generally is something I’m not going to comment on extensively, but I did make this meme about it:
AI Mass Assassination Factory
The use of AI in military contexts is deeply concerning. Like anyone else paying attention in this space, I’ve been talking and writing about this for years. This is where we see some of the biggest risks taking shape. Not the “AGI is Skynet!” stuff, or the hyper-fixation on this or that visualization app. No, it’s about how authoritarian governments and corporations are going to utilize it to further accelerate what they’ve already been doing.
For instance, how about what The Guardian called a “mass assassination factory”, run by AI systems?
…Sources familiar with how AI-based systems have been integrated into the IDF’s operations said such tools had significantly sped up the target creation process.
“We prepare the targets automatically and work according to a checklist,” a source who previously worked in the target division told +972/Local Call. “It really is like a factory. We work quickly and there is no time to delve deep into the target. The view is that we are judged according to how many targets we manage to generate.”
Separate sources told the publication the Gospel had allowed the IDF to run a “mass assassination factory” in which the “emphasis is on quantity and not on quality”. A human eye, they said, “will go over the targets before each attack, but it need not spend a lot of time on them”.
For some experts who research AI and international humanitarian law, an acceleration of this kind raises a number of concerns. For some experts who research AI and international humanitarian law, an acceleration of this kind raises a number of concerns.
Talk about an understatement. This is unbelievably dystopian. And yet, it’s also quite predictable and believable, as it’s what we’ve been running towards blindfolded for decades. Not just with the embrace of this technology in ‘military applications’, but with the drone programs that have come before, what’s happened to privacy on the internet. Each of us running around with a listening and tracking device in our pocket. Corporate capture, resource extraction. Etc.
Whatever new hell on earth is given birth by all of this I cannot say… But it’s clear the US government and Corporations following “business as usual” has played a large hand in getting us here, however inadvertent some outcomes may have been.
So yes, as the quoted Guardian article said, all of this “raises a number of concerns”.
I also wanted to highlight a recent episode on the Parallax Views podcast that went into this in a bit more depth.
(Full disclosure: J G Michaels is a friend. He’s been doing a lot of good work gathering a fairly diverse array of informed perspectives — currently on the Israeli / Palestinian conflict.)
Parallax Views Podcast: Israeli Intelligence Failure & Bombing of Gaza w/ Dave DeCamp/Israel’s War Against Hams w/ David C. Hendrickson/Iran’s Response to the Gaza War w/ Muhammad Sahimi
Climate and the Poly/Meta Crisis:
We’ve been hearing a lot of big promises at COP 28 in Dubai over the past few days, as well as the more predictable bickering and gaffes. An agreement on reducing methane, claims about doubled energy efficiency by 2030, some kind of agreement about the loss and damage fund (although the numbers are paltry, less than 0.2% needed)… Mostly all of these promises remain without real accountability, so it’s hard to take it all that seriously. For now, the numbers based on actual measurements just go up and up. (Climate Trace)
However, to be uncharacteristically charitable, by and large Europe has done fairly well on conservation and transition, when factoring in the Russia / Ukraine war. It’s possible to improve, even if not remotely fast enough. It’s possible to reduce emissions by 50% in 10 years, if everything we do individually and as a society is pushing in that direction.
The question is if on a societal level that is actually where we are.
So yes… If we start seeing consistently sizable reductions in measurable atmospheric CO2 and Methane, that’d be something worth noting. Until then it’s words on a splashy mailer. And of course, the absurdity of COP being held in Dubai is hard to ignore. As is the fact that emissions are still rising, (recent estimates are 9–10% increase by 2030) and even if they had only shrunk that amount it would still be bad news.
“It now looks inevitable that we will overshoot the 1.5C target of the Paris agreement, and leaders meeting at Cop28 will have to agree to rapid cuts in fossil fuel emissions even to keep the 2C target alive.”
As I’ve written, 2 C is not just 2 C, it’s not just floods or drought or saltwater incursion, or the spread of novel pathogens, or an increase in conflicts and ethnonationalism. It’s all of those things and 100 others all affecting each other in ways we can hardly begin to hypothesize. It’s about that amount of excess energy being dumped into the systems at work within earth’s (mostly) closed bubble.
In truth, for as much as I use “climate change” to refer to these issues broadly, as the behaviors and outputs that are raising CO2 and methane in the atmosphere are one and the same with why there’s microplastics in the clouds. But as Daniel Schmachtenburger explains in this video, maybe the term “metacrisis” is better. (Starts about 3 minutes in).
Daniel Schmachtenburger’s Presentation on the Metacrisis (video)
When Daniel started talking, I have to admit I kept thinking of that episode of Star Trek: TNG when a Riker who has been living in a universe that is already at war with the Borg refuses to go back to the absolute hellscape he has left.
But in all seriousness, I think his comments are worth watching, and considering. It’s not just this thing or that thing, it’s how the things all relate and interconnect.
Long Covid
The last thing that’s been on my mind a lot this year, just about every day if I’m being honest: what I’ve watched happen in real time as a debilitating illness was normalized and pushed even further into the margins.
“About as many adults ages 18 to 64 now report severe cognitive issues as report trouble walking or taking the stairs, for the first time since the bureau started asking the questions each month in the 2000s.” — NY Times Article
There’s a lot in here that is worth knowing.
“Few people with long COVID demonstrate full recovery, with one study finding that 85% of patients who had symptoms 2 months after the initial infection reported symptoms 1 year after symptom onset. Future prognosis is uncertain, although diagnoses of ME/CFS and dysautonomia are generally lifelong.”
Chronic illnesses changed my life even before Covid entered the equation, and watching how we’ve reacted societally to this pandemic in and of itself was a life-changing event — and bodes very poorly for how things are going to go as the metacrisis accelerates. That is, if making a few relatively minor changes such as mandatory sick leave, wearing a mask in public places and etc are too much to ask, just wait until we find out that almost everything we use is based on petroleum technology, and what it will actually take to completely cease emissions by 2050. (An absolutely essential step for all of us to take if we intend to have a society in 100 years.)
I may have lost nearly a year of my life to long covid, and still frequently find myself with more brain fog, fatigue or dizziness than I had from fibromyalgia alone, but quite a few of my friends and many millions of people I don’t know have not been nearly so lucky.
We’re all hanging in there and making do the best we can. There are fewer good sources of information these days, but you can often get a sense from The People’s CDC’s weekly reports.
That’s it for the bummers. But I talk about these things because not doing so is part of how that normalization and erasure is orchestrated.
Things I’m Working On:
Alterran Campaign / Fallen Cycle RPG:
I’m deep in the planning stages for our fourth RPG set in the Fallen Cycle mythos. This campaign, set in the dream-world of Alterran, will explore the early conflicts between Chernaya and the Feyn, predating the events of Tales From When I Had A Face by a couple of centuries.
I have some of the initial setting notes for players ready to go up on the blog for those curious to get a peek at setting material that won’t be public for several years.
For now, here’s a map of the northern regions of Alterran. This is taking an evocative approach, as obviously the major locations are essentially enlarged. That made sense to me since for the most part the story is likely to take place either in those locations or in the travel between them, so their relative position is much more important than making sure the Skalliheim tower is the correct proportion to the scale of the map.
I’m still working on this, about 12 hours in now. Textures and patterns are generated, but I’ve done the bulk of the work from there by hand, including a great deal by hand with watercolor, pencil and ink brushes. So many tiny lines!
Tales From When I Had A Face Limited Edition Hardcover:
For the holidays, I’m offering the special limited edition hardcovers of “Tales” for a 20% discount ($50+shipping). This 300-page, full-color edition is a unique collector’s item and can only be purchased directly from me. A box of copies is MIA so I’m down to about 10 copies left to sell, first come first serve and all that.
I’m also extending this to February because I intended to have this ready by the 1st and then wanted to wait until I’d finished a few things that were nearly there. Mea culpa.
Drop me a line if you’d like one.
Illustration and Concept Work:
I’m currently working on a digital painting inspired by the Land of the Dead sequence in Tales, tapping some of that dark fairytale essence. (It’s elderberry, datura and lavender scented, if you’re curious).
This’ll likely just be for the updated Mythos section on the website I’ve been working on a piece at a time. But we’ll see.
I also recently got around to typing up an example of a recent visual workflow / process thang. Talking about how I went about working up a demo comic for Quicknife. After we game in Alterran a bit I may be returning to this with a Kickstarter… that or maybe a BLACKOUT 2054 crew joint? Time will tell. I have scripts bouncing around for both.
The real challenge is getting the scratch and interest up enough to make illustrating a 64–72 page graphic novel worthwhile.
Opening Commissions for Next Year:
I’m excited to announce that I’m now accepting commission, concept, and consulting work for the upcoming year.
My spell slots are limited these days, but I still usually get a re-up from a Long Rest. If you have a vision you want to bring to life, feel free to reach out to me.
