A while back, lets say, in August or so¹, I redid the design of this site and added a new subtitle: “Dialectical Futurism.” The dweeby, philosophy geek in me really enjoys this, just as an idea. As it’s sat at the top of the page, I’ve also thought more and more that the subtitle is actually a pretty good summary of what I’m trying to accomplish here. This post is an attempt to do two things:

1. Concisely summarize my “blogging project” and thus explain what dialectical futurism means.

2. To do a bit of a status update on the blog, as a sort of “self report,” of what I think seems to be working and what doesn’t.

Part One: What “Dialectical Futurism” Meas In Practice.

It’s always risky, I think for a self-claimed “Science Fiction” writer, to declare themselves a “Futurist” of any sort. Because of the genre’s link to the future, I think there the danger that people might think that we’re putting forth our stories as works of prediction.

While I think my interest in futurism comes from a similar place as the interests that drive my fiction, the practice of futurism (in the form of this blog) and the practice of fiction are very different. Ultimately, both are historical endeavors and futurism is tends to be much more tightly focused on the recent history. At least for me.

Dialectical futurism, is about a conversation between me, and the past, and me and the possible future, it’s an attempt to synthesize a pragmatic view of what will happen, with an optimistic view of what I would like to happen. It’s about putting all of the topics I blog about like Open Source, Free Software, Cooperative structure, Economics, and the “New Media” in conversation with each other and seeing what kind of cool innovative things happen.

Part Two: The Status of the Project

The project of being a writer is one of constant self improvement, I think. One thing that I didn’t mention in that post is that no matter how awesome you are as a writer, you’re always trying to get better at writing. There’s always some improvement to make, some short-falling in your ability to communicate that you’re working at improving.

I have the sense that I am getting better, if that’s a meaningful judgment. One improves as a writer, I’m convinced, by writing, and writing a lot, and as I write a bunch for this site and a bunch for work, and a bunch for other projects, I think I’m starting to get better. Also, I get a lot of feedback from coworkers on my writing, which I think has been helpful. Editors are a good thing indeed.

I think I’ve gotten better at figuring out how to write good blog entries--it still takes time, but I get into the grove more quickly. I’m getting better feedback, and I’m reasonably happy with where the traffic is. I mean, there’s always room for improvement, but things are headed in the right direction.

My short term goals are two fold:

1. To focus my energies on reading and improving my background knowledge in a number of areas. I want to be more contextually grounded in existing conversations regarding economics, anthropology, and cyborg-related materials.
2. To spend a lot more time on fiction writing. This means developing new habits, adjusting priorities, and spending some serious time making fiction projects work. So there.

We’ll see how this goes, and thanks as always for reading and putting up with me.

I just wanted to post something to point out that I’ve updated my about page and I think you might enjoy having a look. I always do enjoy reading other peoples'. Also another question:

How are you all feeling about the archives of this site? I’ve been slow on the uptake with regards to updating tychoish.com’s new archive system. Which makes it sound as if I have something in the works, when really all I did was grep through the archives and got lists of posts that seemed relevant to a couple of key topics.

I’m not terribly keen on just throwing up an archive with links to everything, becuase there are probably getting close to 1400 entries, and I think not all of them are particularly relevant or interesting. So I guess the question is: what do you find most useful in terms of website archives, and what format works the best for you? What do you want me to do?

Also, I think we’re slowly creeping up on 600,000 words in the blog, only a month or two more, I think.

Cheers, tycho

• Monday morning, before I left St. Louis, the trash truck or something took out the phone line behind the house. The phone line which carries the internet. Sigh. So while I’ve been driving and have been somewhat out of touch, by the nature of this whole process, the fact that the internet died didn’t help things. Sorry for the lack of posts.
• The midwest (particular the northern and parts that I’m most familiar) is, on the whole, incredibly boring to drive through. Not stunningly boring, but not that bad. By the time you get to eastern Ohio, however, things start to get interesting. The miles and miles of corn fields interspersed with the lone standing tree and occasional soybean crop--you know you’re in trouble when soybeans come as a refreshing change of pace--were replaced with rolling hills, mountains, and the like.

To make up for this, however, it did seem that they were doing a lot of construction/road repair for very little improvement. Parts of the eastern edge of the turnpike were actually pretty good: modern, pretty wide, in good repair; other parts, not so much.

Although, to be sure, heading east was much better than heading west. Better to get the bland out of the way first, and have something interesting at the end.

• I met Chris for the first time, in the flesh. Dude. This requires it’s own sublist:

1. I think the common perception is that things that happen in meatspace are somehow more authentic, and meaningful, and “real” than conversations that happen on line, and often I’d agree. While I’m certainly not complaining about the real-life experience, I do think that there are some distinct disadvantages:

   It’s hard to share links in meatspace, and so “hey I was reading this thing, here’s a link, and I thought that it was nifty and has implications for ____” becomes, not a stepping stone for another thought, but an exercise in “hell, I read something not that long ago and thought it seemed relevant.

   Chris and I tend to have these interleaved conversations where we’ll sort of drift through a few topics at once, and because at least in an ephemeral sort of way chats are logged, it’s hard to interrupt the other person, even if there are a couple of threads of quasi-related material on the table at once. Without the benefit of a running transcript you have to remember more and that’s weird, or at least it feels weird in this context. I’ll adjust I’m sure.

2. On the whole, he is (and the occasion was) pretty much what I expected. I’ve had this theory about “how people turn out to really be in reality versus how they seem online,” which is that after enough time (months/years) it’s pretty hard to maintain any sort of ruse or false facade. Sure, people lie, and people lie in real life, but those amount to little surprises. Big surprises? Unlikely. That held true.

   The cats have been reasonably cooperative. They’re sort of scared of the outside, and were made nervous by the whole experience. Thankfully their response was to cower/sleep in the carrier and not make a lot of noise. I’m leaving them with M.N. in Philadelphia for a night or two while I secure digs for us in New Jersey.

   M.N. and I will have a couple of opportunities this weekend to do shape note singing. Woot!

   It’s nice to know that summer, even early summer, isn’t quite as brutal everywhere as it is in St. Louis (or the other places where I’ve (semi)recently spent my summers: Kansas City, Nashville, and St. Louis of course.) Between that and the Wisconsin winter tolerance, which hasn’t yet worn off, I think I have a freakishly broad temperature tolerance.

   Eastern time is weird. Though, at least for a little while, I like it because it sort of means that my body doesn’t quite get that it’s daylight savings time. And there are very few things that I hate more than daylight savings time.

And I think, that’s all the news that’s fit to print.

Edited to add: I’m going to continue such musing regarding my current state over on my live journal which seems the more appropriate venue for this kind of blathering. Real post tomorrow. I swear.

Deep Breath.

I have news for you all which I hope will explain my absence for the past 10 or 15 days. Actually I’m surprised that it’s only been 10 or 15 days, as it feels so much longer. Anyway, enough suspense:

I’ve accepted a position with Linode to work on (primarily) a really cool technical writing project. You can see the announcement here.

This is really awesome because:

• It’s a job. Writing. About Linux, and Web Servers, and Free Software/Open Source.
• Linode rocks. I applied for the job somewhat before I bought a linode, and I’ve been nothing but pleased with the service which has worked flawlessly for me so far. The best part, is I think that Linode’s approach to technology, to using and developing technology, really fits in with the kinds of values and approaches that I hold.
• Did I mention it’s a writing job where I get to work with Linux and free software?
• It puts me on the east coast, near Philadelphia, where the largest concentration of my non-College friends are located, which has me unbelievably excited. I’ll be able to gossip and dance with M.N. more than once a year; I’ll be able to hang out and with my emergency-backup-big-sister (H.C.) more often; it’ll be feasible to hang out with Chris you know ever and more. I’m so psyched.
• Did I mention it’s a writing job where I get to work with Linux and free software?

The astute among you will thus, notice that:

• New job elsewhere means relocation. Which means.
• I’ve been busy doing all of the relocation things: packing, doing this and that’s, more packing, getting paperwork in order, even more packing, and so forth that I’ve not been really good at keeping on top of the blog. I have a couple of entries stashed, but my rhythm is all off kilter.
• The job announcement has my real name in it. I have an abandoned a post or two about the whole tycho/sam thing. I should perhaps restart it. I think what I really need is this highly mythologized about page that talks about tycho and sam in different voices.

The truth is, that while I don’t think my reasons for using “tycho garen” these days is the same as it was 2.5 or 3 years ago, but I really like what I’ve done with the whole tycho thing, and I can’t really imagine not using it.

• In a lot of ways, I think, writing this blog for so long is a lot of the reason why I was able to get this job, both because through the experience of writing about technology for the blog gave me the confidence/knowledge/skills that make this tech-writing thing I do possible, and also the blog I think served to demonstrate that I was for real.

This is related to another train of thought that I hope to follow up on in the next few months somewhere, but it strikes me that this, if anything is a marker of success that we’re not particularly prone to attending too. We notice successful blogs that get millions of visits a month and can support their authors on advertising revenue and invited speaking engagements. I think that I’ve achieved some kind of success here, and there are other kinds of success to be had. I want to think about what this means. But first I want to sit with this.

I’ll be in touch, and I look forward to continuing this blog in this “next part” of my journey.

Cheers!

“tychoish” is a weblog that is something of a mashup of new and old weblog styles. New in the sense that I’m powering it using the latest and greatest from Wordpress, and the general idea of the tumblelog; and old in the sense that of tone and organization.

It seems to me that at some point weblogs started being “about things” rather than running collections of personal wanderings, ramblings, and information. In a lot of way this is the model that TealArt still uses, but it’s my intention that TealArt collect essays and slightly more formal pieces.

I’ve tried a number of times to write less formal blogs, most successfully using the LiveJournals Clever on Demand and Awkward, but Enderingly Colloquial. (Usernames celchu19 and tychoish respectively) While I’m still fond of some of the community aspects of LiveJournal, I like the prospect of doing it on my own, and having more control over the whole process. I’ve also tried tumblr and I’ve been generally displeased with the experience. And while microbloging services like jaiku and twitter are great fun, they’re not the same as what I have in mind for this site.

In this vein, this site will have short, (mostly) unedited, and rambling posts, quotes and exchanges too funny to let go by, lists of various kinds, and anything else that just needs to get out. With luck, we’ll also syndicate this mess in the TealArt sidebar. It will be delicious.

(Editor’s Note: Another essay written as a writing sample for an application. The promt is originaly from an SAT II test and is reprinted here because I can and becase we still need more entries as part of our testing phase for whipping everything into shape. Enjoy or not, but it’s here.)

Life is a journey, a quest, a movement that takes all of us from birth to death to complete. Everyone has a different journey, everyone walks down their own path, and many of us spend the entire journey trying to understanding the meaning of our quest. Sometimes the journey moves us forward, sometimes we move backwards. The journey may send us running in circles, or it may turn us upside-down and jostle us about for years on end. Life shows us many things, but understandability, consistency and uniformity never seem to appear. Thus applying a form or figure to represent our journey through life is both a difficult and illogical task. However, by drawing simple conclusions about the journey from our experience, the world around us, and the wisdom found in art and literature we can obtain a much clearer idea of the shape or form we may use to represent our quest.

Because life is a journey and journeys usually extend from point A to point B, a line might be the simplest and most logical form to use when envisioning life. However, the simplicity of this one dimensional figure is incapable of displaying anything other than linear movement. Life is devoid of many things, and linear movement is one of them. Our journey takes us from some point A, to another different point B, but the path is far from direct. In between point A and point B, we may move backwards, take wrong turns, spend time walking in circles, and meandering endlessly. In addition to its inadequacies when representing the path of life, the line fails to capture a number of other important aspects of life. Most notably, the changes in perspective that result from our experiences and environmental influences are devoid from linear representation. that shape our view of life and the world around us throughout our lives. The circle, with its added dimension, is a much better representation of life than the line, but it too has short comings. The circle, as well as other two dimensional geometric shapes, is regular, exact, and is only able to capture at best one of the many complex aspects of life. Another figure, one which combines the movement of a line, with the changes in perspective of a circle, and a third dimension to display the depth of the human sprit is needed.

The Möbius strip is just that, a one sided figure that can be constructed by taking a strip of paper twisting one end one hundred and eighty degrees and attaching the two ends together. If you place at any point on a Möbius strip, and draw a straight line without removing the point from the paper you will eventually reach your starting point after drawing your line on every surface of the Möbius strip. This object can represent many aspects of a typical human life. The line on the strip represents the movement and change in the journey of life, the circular nature of the line can represent both the cycle and occasional circuitous nature of the journey. The dual dimensional nature of the Möbius strip is puzzling and thus is apt to represent the puzzling nature of our journey and the enduring curiosity of the human mind. It seems that it is this curiosity that leads us to contemplate this question in hopes of understanding ourselves, our journey, the world around us, and our place and purpose in the world.

More than any other single source, our experiences on the journey help us to draw the best conclusions about the nature of the path. Feeling and seeing life’s trials on a daily basis can give us the best impressions of a realistic form to represent our journey. At different times in our life we experience the world around us from different perspectives and we travel in different directions; more often than not, we are confused by the reasons and the path that we have to travel. Beneath these experiences is a relentless and undying curiosity about all aspects of life which we as a species seem to possess. Without this thrust and inquisitive nature our existence seems to lose meaning, purpose, and forward drive. These experiences suggest the Möbius strip as a perfect representation of the human experience because it embodies nearly all of the characteristics of the human experience in a concrete and lucid manner.

Academic studies of various disciplines, while not as concrete in nature as studies of our own experience may provide us with an even clearer idea of the form of the sojourn we make. Throughout the studies of literature and history we find numerous examples of the nature of human thought, as well as unique views of the human quest and insightful looks into various parts of the journey from different perspectives. By looking into historical events and figures we can look at the journey of another as a whole from beginning to end. The accounts of the lives of great leaders, and important activists shed light on the lives of those who impact the world in profound ways; their journeys are important and can help us to determine the path we all follow in some form or another. Likewise, the study of literature and the arts can help us to trace the journey of the common people through life and can give us insight into more particular parts of the journey than most historical accounts. Other academic pursuits such as science and mathematics can lend further support in the quest for the meaning and shape of life’s journey. The Möbius strip itself is the result of work done by nineteenth century German mathematician August Ferdinand Möbius and it is his work in the field of topology that has allowed us the ability to give form to life’s journey. Without studies into science and the humanities, we wouldn’t have any notion or grounding in who we are and where we’ve been. Without such grounding it would be impossible to determine where we are going, and the representative form of the journey as a whole.

The form, structure, reason, purpose, and shape that our journey through life takes is a subject of immense importance and with the assistance of experience on life’s road. Through certain academic pursuits we are able to theorize what shape life might take if it were represented in a physical shape or object. The Möbius strip presents itself as the likeliest form for the journey to take. Möbius strips incorporate characteristics of many aspects of the human existence and journey, such as the changes of perspective, the circular and linear directions of the path, and the undying curiosity of humanity for the nature of the journey. All answers lie on the journey; proper investigation of the human quest will only result in more questions, but then again that’s the way life is.

(**Editor’s Note:**Another short piece I wrote for school about my writing ability and the character of my writing strenghts and weeknesses. Here because we need content. Hopefully this will be over soon.)

I am a fiction writer who dabbles in nonfiction essays and articles; or maybe I am an article and essay writer who dabbles in fiction. In either case, it’s fairly clear that I am not a poet or a dramatist. It could be a lack of skill, experience, or talent. More likely, this pitfall in my ability is due to divine will rather than anything under my control. Some peopleóincluding meóare not capable of to write poetry or drama.

To say that I can’t write poetry isn’t to say that I’m physically or mentally incapable of writing in verse; however, I haven’t been able to amass any evidence that I am capable of writing poetry, and not for any lack of effort. Numerous times I’ve tried, and tried to write poetry, I’ve worked with a great deal of dedication without producing one poem that fills my definition of good poetry: a group of words that sends a message that is somehow larger than the words on the sheet of paper. I am somehow incapable of doing this.

Unlike poetry, my chances of ever writing drama are not quite as dire. With a great deal of time, effort, planning, and blood letting, it is conceivable that I could write and/or produce scripts that would at least equal the quality of my prose. Despite a familiarity with the form, I have yet to find success writing scripts with a satisfactory similarity to the picture in my mind’s eye. This isn’t to say that a work needs to end up exactly like the creator foresaw, but the work needs to maintain a certain continuity with the authors evolving vision.

Just because I haven’t been able to write a good script, and because I doubt I’ll ever be able to write a poem, I don’t hold any ill regard for either of these forms. In fact, good drama and poetry has a greater influence on my prose than the novels and short stories that I absorb. Quality poetry has the ability to express a message in the purest most beautiful form. Almost every good script, produced or not, can boil a plot into the most visual and descriptive form with minimum use of adjectives and adverbs. The lessons learned in story telling from drama, and the lessons about language learned through poetry transfers nicely into other forms, such as the fiction and non-fiction prose I write. I can only hope that some of this genius is rubbing off on me.

Something unfortunate has happened dear readers. The entire databases for this site as well as CollectiveArts were lost. When all, or most, of the content of a site is stored in a mySQL database, site management becomes really easy and the file structure becomes clean and logically arranged: it’s great. When you’re old hosts sever craps out and you must move to a nicer facility with out a database dump: it’s a pain in the ass.

Nothing’s changed, and everything works as it should, unfortunately, all of that old content is here. I should be moping around and fighting like hell to get a fairly recent backup of the database, but I’m not. Its ok, and Chris and I will be able to move forward. After all a fresh start that clears out all of that start that I’ve started to get a little embarrassed about is an okay thing. I’m not celebrating it, but it’s not a bad thing. I’ve posted two of the entries from my personal archive that I’m rather proud of (and I did postdate one), and we’ll continue from here.

After a month of not having a working website, I’d think that it’s good to be back.