Starfield: A city is a cluster of shiny Zaha Hadid buildings surrounded by an infinity of unspoiled wilderness full of Resources. If you walk ten meters away from the helipad you can plop down an Outpost that hoovers up all the iridium off the ground. Space is unlimited free real estate and everyone can be their own little self-made yeoman factory baron

Armored Core: This planet has oil so they covered it in drilling platforms the size of continents and sucked the whole thing dry like a capri sun, then bored through the surface and ate its guts from the inside out using literal worms. The sheer scale and inhumanity of capital is utterly beyond comprehension; you're driving a 200-foot-tall death machine but every time you look upwards you feel like a mouse in a sidewalk crack. When the profits fell they built a cage around the entire world and covered it in guns pointing down

I was asked to create an audio drama adaptation of a chapter of The Book of the New Sun, so I did, and it's here, and I'd really like people to listen and enjoy it. But like I was saying to a friend earlier this week, the content is not really interested in onboarding you, the listener. So I thought I'd make an introductory post to give people a handle on what this is and what's going on:

Listen to the audio drama
Production Diary posts so far
Poster by Gryme

we all knew that AI generated crap was going to get people killed but this is an exceptionally awful way to die

• they look almost identical to several edible species
• they taste extremely normal and after eating one you will feel relatively normal for 4-6 hours afterward.
• cooking and other methods of preparation have no effect on the toxins the mushrooms contain
• By the time symptoms manifest you are already dead - even half a single mushroom is lethal to adults
• death caps contain upwards of 3 different toxins that cause, among other things, cell rupture and you will experience total organ failure within 72 hours and there is absolutely nothing that can be done to save you

to describe writing a "mushroom guidebook" using AI as dangerous and irresponsible is the largest possible understatement. This could genuinely, easily get people killed.

I've been on a tear against Capitalism lately, and a refrain I've heard often but have thus far been unable to rebut is, "So how will you buy stuff without money?" I can explain why that's a facile argument until I'm blue in the face, sure, but when I put myself in the shoes of my opponent and look back at myself, well...

I've got a stainless steel Apple Watch with an expensive band on my wrist. I'm wearing Duluth or Carhartt with a Lockwood51 belt. I've been tapping on an iPhone 14 Pro, I'm wearing Japanese eyeglasses (which are too small for my big-ass American headshape), carrying a Fujifilm X-Pro 3 with a $400-$1200 lens on it, with Peak Design straps and cuffs and bags, wearing Sony XM4 headphones...

No wonder they think this argument is valid. To them, I probably look like a damn hypocrite. Yes, I'm a huge tech nerd, I LOVE SHINY THINGS, and my interests skew towards expensive electronics for gaming, home theater, music listening, computing, you name it. All of this is to say I couldn't really answer their question, because I didn't quite know what the answer was. Like, obviously Capitalism doesn't mean the end of money...right?

Enter "How Capitalism Ends" by Steve Paxton, a book that helped fill in a lot of my own gaps regarding the history of the Capitalism economic model as well as prepare me to answer these questions. One of the biggest lessons it taught me was that it's worth actually considering my opponent's perspective when they make an argument with receptive conviction, because it's my opening to actually try and change their perspective. As Steve repeats throughout his book (and that I'll paraphrase here): it's not our obligation to defend progressive policies aimed at improving life for all; rather, it's the responsibility of the opponent to explain how justice, equality, democracy, and humanity are improved for everyone by preventing the change.

Let's start with money...