Why is this blog called “The Third Alternative”?

What is this all about, anyway? Well, you've come to the right place for answers. Originally, the title came form a song by the metal band Monster Magnet, but there is nothing beyond that linking the blog to the song or its lyrics. It's just a band I like, and I thought it was a cool song name.

We often see extreme opposites all around us, and many people convinced their way is the best way. It's at the heart of most conflicts. This religion versus that one. This ideology versus that one. This color versus that one. But if you take the time to look deeper, you will notice very few things are black and white. Most thigs in the world are some shade of gray. When two perspectives collide, look for that gray area, look for that third alternative, and you'll be closer to the truth.

Example: you drive to work and someone cuts you off and speeds 30 past the speed limit. You mumble a swear word and shake your head. You call that driver an asshole. You don't think anything past this. We have rules on the road and this driver is clearly a danger to society and, more importantly, a jerk for cutting you off. What if this is a man who just got a call from the hospital and his wife just showed up in ER? Sure, it may not justify putting others on the road at risk, but maybe you will feel less self-righteous judging this “dangerous driver” when you know the full story.

My blog title is a reminder to myself to consider these angles when I write about something divisive.

#opinion

Inbetweeners Part 4- Doors

One of the most unique characteristics of the early Inbetweeners Campaign was how the player characters moved around the world. As described previously, they were brought back to life slightly phased out of reality. As a result, they could not move linearly but instead warped between different locations. The portals through which they warped became known as “doors.” Each “room” had between one and four doors, or portals that would take them to another room. Most portals were two way, one could move back and forth. Others, however, might only move in one direction. Furthermore, some doors were hidden unless players achieved certain conditions, or could only be accessed while certain conditions unlocked.

This novel means of travel did create a few logistical issues in terms of gameplay. First off was the issue of players abusing the mechanic, being halfway through one door and another. This also created logistical issues for the DM— how does it work if atmospheric and other conditions vary vastly among the two locations? When players go through, can other NPCs see the alternate location? To resolve this, I decided the doors are only visible to the players and traveling through them was a binary. You were either in one room or another. So take for example The Market. This was a large, bustling market in a major town square. Two of the gates into and out of the market served as portals, as well as an abandon stall and a refuse trough. The gates were simple, if a character walked through one they'd suddenly be somewhere else, vanishing to anyone watching, whereas any NPC would just walk through the gate as normal. The abandon stall was a shopping stall with no vendor, if a player tried to go behind the table or into the stall they would suddenly find themselves in the dining room of an abandon haunted mansion, next to a table covered in cobwebs with skeletons sitting in each seat. The refuse trough was a disgusting trough of excrement, vomit, stagnant water and rotting food. If the players came close enough to touch it, they would suddenly disappear from the market and appear inside of a massive oven that immediately activates.

The “infernal oven” was interesting because the door out of it back to the market wasn't immediately accessible. Instead, they had to find a way to break through part of the oven to find a release hatch. So sometimes characters would not spawn directly next to the door they want through. This created another issue though- difficulty scaling. Some of the rooms were very challenging, and the players were only level 1. I needed a way for them to not be terrified to travel through new doors. If certain death could wait on the other side, it really disincentivizes exploration. Since the players were not the Interloper's first participants, he had encountered this issue before. Many participants would leave to explore the rooms and simply never return. My thought is that for each new batch of participants, they had a completely separate batch of doors and rooms, linked to the time and way in which they were brought back. Almost like RNG on a map generator. So, the Interloper needed to find a way to reduce attrition of his participants or he would never gather sufficient samples and research material. Since he exists slightly outside of space-time, he can use this to his advantage in limited ways. Basically, when players go through a door, there is a strong emotional anchor to how they react to what is on the other side. That small piece of information can be sent back in time enough to code a door. So the Interloper created a simple heuristic- green means relatively safe and red means relatively dangerous. The more red the door, the more dangerous whatever is behind it. So the most blindly bright red door was the one that led to Zariel's War Room. This makes sense because collectively all the devils behind it probably amounted to a CR 30 encounter. However, that doesn't mean the entities will immediately attack. Zariel's devils were more interested in interrogation to figure out how the characters penetrated the fortress. But, very dangerous, hence red. On the flip side, the market is green, since it is just a bustling market with various vendors. Basic town guards are present, but they only present a threat to minor criminals so no real threat there. A third category, purple, was used to indicate that a room was “interesting”. This means that it is unusual in some way, or has some feature that other doors/rooms do not. It says nothing about the threat level behind the door. The door that leads to a temple based on which religious relic or icon you present was purple. This makes sense because a temple of Chauntea would be completely safe, vs a temple of Bane might be very dangerous.

The doors did present some novel challenges. Since players couldn't leave a room except through a door, if they were captured, their captors would attempt to take them outside the area only for the players to appear on the other side. This made for some comical instances where the captors would repeatedly move them back only to realize they had to build a makeshift prison in place.

Later in the campaign, when players wanted to go to a specific location outside the rooms, the Interloper was able to create temporary doors, though sometimes they brought the players to a place slightly different than intended. There was also a branch of doors with no hue or warning. These were not created by the Interloper but rather by the Lady of Pain as she initially tests the Inbetweeners, though they were unaware of this at the time. Those doors held grave dangers but no warning.

Once the players had to flee the Grey Room after the Protectors of the Weave invaded and head to the Sigil for safety, they were then bound to Sigil for part of the campaign. In Sigil they moved about normally, since it is a four dimensional city run by the Lady of Pain, who herself was originally from outside the multiverse and as a result, operates on a different planar geometry. It was not until the players completed the Xalatra Questline (which there will be a later post about, at some point) that they were able to travel normally. This did involve covering their bodies with protective runes and then jumping through “The Maw”, which broken them down at a subatomic level and recreated them in such a way that the flaw in the Interloper's resurrection was fixed. At this point, the “door” mechanic in the campaign ended entirely. One could say the doors were a mechanic for the multiplanar dungeon crawl stage of the game, but no longer served a purpose when it broadened out into an epic fantasy.

Inspired by the 5 Albums post, I was thinking about the 5 fiction books that shaped me. I am going mostly from memory. I just want to list whatever comes to my mind first. These are all books that influenced my reading life in one way or another.

1. The Hobbit / Lord of the Rings Trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien: Yeah, I know, not one book. I am already bending the rules here. But I cannot talk about LOTR without The Hobbit, and vice versa. I would also include The Silmarillion here as well. I was completely immersed in this fantasy world from the first time I read The Hobbit.

2. Dune by Frank Herbert: It has been a while since I read this one, but I remember it blew my mind back then. I am secretly afraid of re-reading this book and getting disappointed (I am not sure it aged well). But from what I remember, the complex politics and alien world elements got me super interested in this type of sci-fi.

3. I, Robot by Isaac Asimov: This is another one that I consider a whole series, but this was the first book I read. I loved learning about the positronic brain and the laws of robotics. It was fascinating to see a robopsychologist! I will also include The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun here. Great sci-fi! I want to read them all again.

4. Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle: I absolutely love these books! I can read them over and over. They are great! I used to have a collection of used Sherlock Holmes books. The first time I read them, I borrowed them from the library. After that, I would go to used bookstores and try to find old editions. I love the way Sherlock Holmes pays attention to the smallest details and comes up with deductions using logical reasoning. When the mystery is solved, it is so satisfying!

5. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams: Again, the whole series is included here. These books are a masterpiece of clever humor with scientific nuggets of information. I love how it makes fun of technology, plays with the laws of physics, and is just so much fun. I recently listened to the first two audiobooks, and they are so good!

And now that listed them all I realized it's a list of 5 book series! Ok, I’ll change the title. So, there you go!

— Post 12 of #Blaugust #Books

Yesterday, we had nothing. nothing to say nor complain about. but today? Oh, today we have a complaint. ladies and gentlemen, we are officially back with my basic complaints, so get comfortable. get your blankets, lock the closet, check under the bed. because we’re doing horror today, or, well, what they’ve decided to call “horror”. though, i think i missed the horror somewhere. i went to watch ‘Insidious: Out of the Further’ today, and before anyone gets offended, yes. i found it boring. i think i have finally figured out my problems with horror movies, i dont actually like them. shocking? i know. its just that whenever a movie proudly labels itself “horror” i expect at least some sense of horror, fear. tension. something that makes me sit there and think, maybe i shouldn’t turn the light off tonight. Hasn’t happend once. not a single horror movie ive watched has actually frightened me. not even enough to give me that stupid feeling of checking the corner of my room afterwards. they’re just boring. something jumps out, someone screams too loudly, and the music gets awfully loud, and thats supposed to be terrifying? im supposed to be terrifed? No, i know its acting im not as dumb as you, i know the ghosts arent real and nobody is actually being dragged yadda yadda. the part that i hate the most. nothing feels honest, everything feels staged in the most obvious way possible. the characters behave like any other “horror” movie is expected to behave, act idiotic, scream at nothing and decide to investigate noises alone because common sense was left outside. and Insidious does plenty of that. plently of nonsense, basic horror movie act, oh a dark creepy house, oh strange things happening. How scary, seriously? you call that horror? someone needs to speak to the movie directors i think they accidentally made a childrens bedtime story and forgot to add the bedtime. i almost fell asleep. give me something that feels possible. something that doesnt announce itself with dramatic music and conveniently timed shadow. otherwise, congratulations. you made me stare at a screen with popcorn loud chewers for two hours and feel absolutely nothing but annoyed. boring to dust.

Anyway, that was my complaint for today. tomorrow i’ll find something else to complain about. im sure the world will provide me something as dumb as staying in a notoriously haunted house and treating a literal face scraping demon like an obnoxious roommate who refuses to pay rent.

Sincerely, Dont watch horror movies, kids. you might mistake it for bedtime stories.

Finished only this morning, another title by Jenny Erpenbeck, The Book of Words, a 150-page novella detailing a woman’s recollections of childhood, which take on a progressively more menacing and unnerving cast as they go on. Compared to Go Went Gone, it’s perhaps more stylistically refined — beautifully well-written — though meanwhile a little less to my taste than the later novel. The translation, again by Susan Bernofsky, seems excellent.

---

On Saturday I read The Other Girl by Annie Ernaux, translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer. This is a very slim volume, with the body of the text not amounting to fifty pages, so it didn’t take long to traverse it. At the bookshop in Chepstow that morning I’d first picked up a different Fitzcarraldo title, and had then wondered if there were any of their several volumes of Ernaux’s memoirs & essays on the shelves: as it happened, there was only this one. The book is in the form of a letter by Ernaux to the sister she never met. Ginette Duchesne had died aged 6, in 1938, of diphtheria. Annie was born two years later. As she recalls it, her parents never directly talked to her about her sister, and she describes overhearing her mother talk about ‘the other girl’ only once. Nor did Ernaux ever question her parents about Ginette, whose unspoken absence nevertheless continued to haunt them all:

...you and I were fated to be only children. Their desire to have just one child, which they made very clear (we couldn’t do for two what we are doing for one), meant it was either you or me, but not both... It took almost thirty years [...] for it to hit me: I was born because you died, and I replaced you.

It’s a powerful little book. At times reading it felt uncomfortably like intruding on a series of private moments. On the strength it I’m now keen to read Ernaux’s The Years, though I don’t know if I’ll want to venture much further into her bibliography than that.

---

No new music arrived this week. Instead I can mention a couple of recent acquisitions overlooked in previous posts: Grasshopper (1982) by J.J. Cale, and Quiet (1996) by John Scofield. After Naturally, Troubadour and Travel-Log, Grasshopper is my fourth J.J. Cale album on vinyl. I don’t think it’s unfair to say it’s neither one of the best nor the worst of his records: even so, mid-tier J.J. is well worth my time & attention. ‘City Girls’ was the lead single from it, and perhaps its most memorable tune.

Reading on-line about John Scofield’s album A Go Go, which I bought last month, I saw it had followed a very different release, Quiet, on which the guitarist had played only acoustically, accompanied by drums, bass, and a seven piece horn section, augmented on a couple of numbers by Wayne Shorter on the tenor sax. I obtained a reasonably inexpensive second-hand CD copy via ebay. It’s a subtle and low-key collection of good tunes in elaborate arrangements, all beautifully played. It may not be among Scofield’s best-regarded albums, but it hits a sweet spot for me. Opener ‘After the Fact’ establishes the mood very nicely.

---

After finishing a bottle of Ardbeg last month, I opened something very different on Wednesday evening in the shape of ‘The Targe 30 year-old Highland Single Grain scotch whisky’. When I bought it at Lidl the year before last it was originally earmarked as a gift for someone else. Plans changed, and I kept it instead in reserve for myself. Its time to shine has now finally arrived. My one prior experience of a single grain whisky (sampled decades ago), hadn’t thrilled me, but, on the grounds that it’s all too seldom I can afford to try anything that has languished in a cask for thirty years, I’d been curious to try this one anyway. It’s a light & clean sort of dram, with initial impressions of mellow sweetness in which I discerned notes of coconut crumb and vanilla. Unsurprisingly there is woodiness too, with a typical whisky sourness eventually also asserting itself. It’s very smooth and affable with no murky depths: an interesting change of scenery I think I’ll enjoy.

Agosto | Preguntas sin respuesta

¿Quién me está lastimando?

Me siento triste.

Tengo una batalla interna entre lo que quiero y lo que no quiero. Tengo los ojos llenos de lágrimas. Tenía mucho tiempo que no lloraba, y mucho menos por situaciones así.

Por eso no me gusta sentir.

Siento que cuando lo hago, saco lo peor de mí.

Pero ¿Qué es la vida sin un poco de dolor?

Y entonces aparece la pregunta que no sé contestar:

¿Qué es realmente lo que me lastima?

¿Mi cabeza? ¿La realidad? ¿Quién me lastima? ¿O me lastimo yo misma?

¿Por qué idealizo a la gente? ¿Por qué me cuesta tanto hacer preguntas? ¿Por qué no me doy mi lugar?

¿Por qué, por qué, por qué...?

Por eso me alejo.

Por eso prefiero no sentir nada. Por eso me cierro.

Porque sé que cuando siento, siento demasiado.

No puedo controlar mis emociones. Mis ojos no dejan de llorar y ya no quiero sentirme así.

A veces incluso creo que me lo merezco.

Pero, realmente, ¿Qué mal he hecho yo para merecerlo?

No creo que ninguno.

¿O exagero la realidad?

¿Cómo puedo vivir en la realidad cuando tengo que lidiar con mis miedos y mis deseos?

¿Y qué deseo?

Libertad. Independencia. Amor. Conocer el mundo. Viajar.

Básicamente creo que todo eso es lo mismo.

Pero entonces, ¿Qué tiene de único? ¿Qué tiene de diferente?

Tengo miedo de morir sin amar de verdad.

Tengo miedo de no hacer lo que quiero porque mi cabeza no me lo permita.

Tengo miedo de no vivir.

De no vivir mientras pueda.

Porque si algo sé es que la vida no es eterna.

Entonces, ¿por qué desperdiciar el tiempo?

¿Por qué dar las cosas por sentadas?

¿Por qué conformarse?

Me da miedo ser conformista.

Me da miedo sentir tanto.

Porque cuando uno siente mucho por las personas, también les da el poder de lastimarnos.

Así me pasó.

Con mi mejor amiga.

Ella también me duele.

A veces no entiendo por qué la perdí.

Y tengo miedo.

Tengo miedo de no ser amable conmigo.

De reprocharme tanto.

De sentir que merezco sufrir.

De pensar que las personas son superiores a mí.

¿Por qué no soy amable conmigo?

¿Por qué no pienso de mí lo mismo que pienso de los demás?

Siempre trato de ver lo mejor de todos.

¿Por qué no puedo hacer lo mismo conmigo misma?

¿Por qué siempre veo mis defectos?

Es como verme en un espejo y estar buscando constantemente un error.

Pero ¿por qué?

Quizá esa sea la pregunta que queda cuando todas las demás se han agotado.

No sé quién me está lastimando.

No sé si es la realidad, mi cabeza, las personas que quiero o la forma en que he aprendido a quererlas.

Pero esta noche, por primera vez en mucho tiempo, estoy llorando.

Y quizá no tenga que encontrar una respuesta todavía.

Quizá por ahora solo necesito dejar de preguntarme qué está mal conmigo.

Quizá necesito aprender a mirarme sin buscar un error.

A Quick Win.

I won this club-based CC (Correspondence Chess) game this morning with a Queen-Rook combination Checkmate on my 25th move. We started play on 08 August, so that means only 17 days transpired from the game's opening move until its conclusion. For me, that's a very quick game. I prefer playing with at least 3 days allowed per move. I have some games now in progress where my opponents and I are allowed 14 days per move.

Anyway, the position of pieces at game's end is shown above, and our full move record follows: 1. d4 d5 2. Nc3 Nf6 3. Nf3 Nc6 4. e3 Bf5 5. Bb5 Qd7 6. Ne5 Nxe5 7. Bxd7+ Nexd7 8. O-O e6 9. Re1 O-O-O 10. a4 Kb8 11. b4 Bxb4 12. Bb2 e5 13. a5 Bxc3 14. Bxc3 exd4 15. Bxd4 Rhg8 16. Rb1 c5 17. Bc3 Ne4 18. Bb2 g6 19. Qxd5 Ndf6 20. Be5+ Kc8 21. Qxb7# 1-0

And the adventure continues.

This short essay published on The Marshall Review, marks the beginning of a larger project: defining the discipline of publication architecture. It doesn’t explain the method – that comes later – but it sets out the central idea that a publication is an intellectual structure, not a stream of content. The role of the Publication Architect is to design that structure so meaning can accumulate over time.

https://rvw.ie/h1the-publication-architect-brwhy-structure-matters-more-than-content-h1

The Publication Architect:
Why Structure Matters More Than Content

In an age drowning in content, the real work is architectural: building the conceptual structure within which individual pieces can speak to one another and generate meaning over time.

Everyone talks about content.

Publishers want it. Readers consume it. Algorithms demand an endless supply of it. The modern information economy treats content as the primary unit of value, as though the right words, images, or ideas possess an independent power capable of carrying themselves through the world. Yet content alone rarely explains why some publications endure while others vanish.

The difference may be structural.

A pile of bricks is not a building. A collection of musical notes is not a symphony. And a collection of articles is not necessarily a publication. Something else is required. There must be a framework within which individual pieces acquire meaning through their relationship to one another.

This is the work of the Publication Architect.

The term does not describe a writer, editor, designer, or publisher, though it may include elements of all four roles. A Publication Architect is concerned primarily with the structure that allows a publication to become more than the sum of its parts.

An editor improves individual articles. A Publication Architect asks how those articles speak to one another across months or years. A designer shapes visual experience. A Publication Architect shapes intellectual experience. A publisher distributes content. A Publication Architect creates the conceptual environment within which that content can live, grow, and develop.

The role becomes especially important in an age of digital abundance. Information is no longer scarce. Attention is. Every day, an endless stream of countless words is published online; most of them disconnected from any larger purpose. They appear briefly, compete for attention, and are gone.

The stream is lacking coherence.

Readers do not merely seek information. They seek orientation. They want to understand how one idea connects to another, how today's article relates to yesterday's, how individual observations contribute to a larger conversation. Structure provides orientation.

The most influential publications in history were never defined solely by their content. They were defined by the way the content was organized and revealed. Their editors and founders understood that a publication is not merely a container for ideas, but an intellectual construction, an architecture that guides the reader through them.

Perhaps this is why structure often outlasts content.

Individual articles age. Facts change. Debates shift. Yet a well-constructed publication can continue generating meaning long after many of its original pieces have faded. The architecture remains capable of accommodating new material while preserving continuity with the past.

The future of publishing may therefore depend less on producing more content than on designing the structures that allow meaning to accumulate. A Publication Architect is concerned not with volume but with continuity; with building the intellectual pathways through which readers can move, return, and deepen their understanding over time.

Content furnishes the rooms. Architecture determines whether anyone can find their way through them.

David Marshall Dublin

Author's Note A Publication Architect designs the conceptual structure that allows a publication to generate meaning over time.

Boundless Abundance

Some years back I wrote a short story about humanity discovering the ability to duplicate matter. It focused on the issue of unbounded garbage production that would result from such a technology. I couldn't find the original copy so I instead decided to recreate it. Enjoy!

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Historians would later argue over exactly when the Resource Crisis began, largely because almost every date they proposed could be defended. Copper prices had been climbing since the twenties. Lithium shortages had forced several governments to ration battery production. Rare-earth export controls had become instruments of diplomacy and coercion, while drought and fertilizer shortages periodically drove food prices high enough to topple governments. By 2029, abandoned mines once considered economically worthless were reopening across Europe and North America, and companies were seriously discussing the extraction of metals from landfills. Then came 2030, when several shortages arrived close enough together to reinforce one another. Semiconductor production stalled for want of specialized metals. Grid expansion slowed just as electricity demand reached record levels. A series of poor harvests drove fertilizer prices upward. Oil briefly passed three hundred dollars a barrel. Governments imposed export restrictions to protect domestic supplies, which produced retaliatory restrictions elsewhere, and within months the intricate international machinery that transformed ores, chemicals, energy and labor into modern civilization began seizing like an engine without lubricant.

The wars were small, at first: a disputed cobalt deposit, a naval confrontation over seabed minerals, sabotage at a desalination plant, fighting along the border between two states that had peacefully shared a river for almost a century. None of these conflicts became the world war people feared, but by the end of 2030 there were eleven separate military confrontations in which access to some physical resource was either the acknowledged cause or the barely concealed one. It was during this period that an extraordinary collection of governments, universities, corporations and private foundations began pouring money into a research facility on Jan Mayen, a bleak Norwegian island in the Arctic Ocean whose principal advantages were isolation, political stability and the fact that almost nobody wanted to go there. The official explanation involved high-energy materials research. The actual project consumed more than two hundred billion dollars in eighteen months.

The first successful duplication occurred on November 17, 2031, and the object was a platinum cylinder weighing 4.2 grams. There was nothing visually dramatic about the event. No flash illuminated the laboratory and no thunder shook the building; a second cylinder simply appeared inside a sealed chamber beside the first, possessing the same dimensions, isotopic composition, microscopic scratches and internal crystalline imperfections. For seventeen minutes the scientists assumed an instrument had malfunctioned. Then they weighed both cylinders, and by sunrise they had repeated the experiment thirty-one more times. The mechanism remained only partially understood. Matter placed inside a precisely configured field could somehow serve as a template around which identical matter assembled, while the enormous energy requirement expected by every conventional physical theory simply failed to materialize. The Jan Mayen researchers eventually proposed that the machine was drawing energy, or something analogous to energy, from a domain adjacent to ordinary spacetime. Journalists would later simplify this into the phrase “dark matter between dimensions,” a description physicists despised and everyone else adopted. The important thing was that it worked.

During 2032, duplication remained among the most closely guarded secrets on Earth. The machines were enormous, unreliable and fantastically expensive, but the economics were already absurd. A single flawless crystal could become ten. A milligram of an experimental pharmaceutical compound could become kilograms. Components whose manufacture required months of precision machining could be reproduced in seconds. Space agencies quietly received engine components whose production records did not exist. Hospitals participating in supposedly unrelated clinical trials suddenly stopped reporting shortages of several rare medicines. Semiconductor manufacturers associated with the project experienced mysterious improvements in output. The scientists begged the governments involved to proceed cautiously, and the governments agreed, until someone leaked a photograph.

On May 4, 2033, a Swedish newspaper published an image showing forty-seven identical iridium components arranged on a table at Jan Mayen. Metadata attached to the original file led investigators to other documents, and within seventy-two hours the world's greatest secret became the world's greatest scandal. People understood the implications immediately. There were demonstrations outside government ministries, not because people feared the technology, but because they wanted it. Why, protesters asked, were children still dying because their parents could not afford medicine if medicine could simply be copied? Why were countries fighting over metals that could be created without mines? Why did anyone need to go hungry? Why were houses expensive? Why were governments sitting on a machine that appeared to have abolished scarcity? Late that year, under enormous political pressure, the Jan Mayen consortium acknowledged what it had created. An international nonprofit organization, the Material Abundance Foundation, was established to control duplication facilities and license their use according to humanitarian need. Its first public projects were carefully selected: insulin, antibiotics, rare surgical equipment, water purification membranes, high-performance electrical transformers and components for fusion experiments. For several months, humanity behaved responsibly.

China broke the monopoly first. Whether Chinese researchers independently reconstructed the underlying physics, obtained technical information from someone inside the Jan Mayen project, or combined fragments of leaked research with an already advanced domestic program was never conclusively established. What mattered was that in February 2034, a Chinese industrial consortium demonstrated a working duplicator at a research complex outside Chengdu. It was less efficient than the Jan Mayen machines and considerably larger, but it worked, and the knowledge required to construct it was no longer confined to a single institution. The United States demonstrated its own system four months later. India followed before the end of the year. Japan, South Korea, France, Germany and several multinational corporations announced successful systems during 2035, while simplified designs circulated through academic networks and industrial espionage made secrecy increasingly meaningless. The technology had crossed the threshold that governments feared most: duplication could now be used to manufacture the components required to manufacture more duplicators. Control became impossible.

The price of platinum collapsed first, followed by gold, lithium, cobalt, nickel, titanium, tungsten and almost every other commodity whose value derived primarily from physical scarcity. Mining companies vanished with astonishing speed. Oil prices followed when duplicators proved capable of reproducing synthetic hydrocarbons, although electricity itself became so inexpensive once reactor components, solar panels, transmission equipment and grid-scale batteries could be replicated that burning fuel increasingly seemed quaint. The economic dislocation was violent but remarkably brief, because the same technology destroying old industries was simultaneously creating abundance on a scale no economic system had previously contemplated. By 2035, the physical cost of manufacturing had approached zero. Design still mattered. Transportation still mattered. Land mattered because coordinates could not be duplicated. Human attention mattered. Experiences mattered. Reputation, creativity, expertise, entertainment and access mattered. But once somebody had constructed one functioning example of a physical object, producing the second was nearly free.

A company might spend six billion dollars designing a new aircraft and six dollars manufacturing it. An architect could spend years creating a beautiful house, after which ten million identical houses could be produced for approximately the cost of moving them to ten million building sites. Prefabricated hospitals appeared across Africa and South Asia. Desalination facilities multiplied along coastlines. Agricultural machinery became effectively free. Greenhouses covered deserts. Bridges that poorer governments had postponed for generations appeared within months. Poverty, at least as humanity had historically understood the term, began to disappear, and people bought things in astonishing quantities. At first this seemed charming. A teenager who wanted twelve pairs of shoes could have twelve pairs of shoes. A family could replace a broken refrigerator rather than repair it. Furniture became fashion. Nobody handed clothes down to younger siblings because clothing was essentially free. Restaurants stopped washing many utensils because producing new ones was cheaper. Hotels replaced mattresses monthly. Airlines periodically discarded entire cabin interiors. Consumer electronics became almost absurdly ephemeral; companies sometimes released hardware revisions every few weeks because manufacturing costs no longer justified waiting for annual product cycles, and perfectly functional devices were discarded by the billions when slightly thinner, faster or more fashionable replacements appeared. The old economic instinct toward conservation had depended upon scarcity, and scarcity was gone.

By 2036, municipal waste systems were collapsing, but physical volume was only the most visible manifestation of the problem. Rivers accumulated plastics faster than cleanup systems could remove them. Synthetic fabrics shed microscopic fibers in quantities that dwarfed twentieth-century pollution. Heavy metals leached from mountains of abandoned electronics. Cheap chemical production produced an explosion of paints, solvents, fertilizers, refrigerants and industrial compounds, many of which were released casually because replacing contaminated equipment or soil was cheaper than cleaning it. Atmospheric pollution briefly increased despite the collapse of fossil-fuel combustion, driven instead by construction dust, chemical aerosols, incineration and industrial processes operating at scales that would previously have been economically impossible. For a few years, environmental engineering experienced its own golden age. Governments duplicated filtration membranes by the square kilometer, deployed autonomous machines to collect plastics from oceans, capped contaminated soil beneath impermeable barriers, and installed enormous atmospheric scrubbers around cities. Rivers that had been polluted for generations were cleaned. Toxic industrial sites were excavated wholesale and replaced with pristine soil. Entire wetlands were reconstructed from carefully catalogued biological templates. The irony was difficult to miss: duplication was simultaneously creating unprecedented pollution and making environmental restoration astonishingly cheap.

Restoration, however, could remove contaminants from ecosystems only by putting them somewhere else. Governments tried recycling incentives and then recycling mandates, but recycling had become economically irrational. Why expend energy and labor recovering aluminum when unlimited flawless aluminum could be duplicated from a single block? Why refurbish a computer when the new model cost almost nothing? Why dismantle a washing machine for parts when every part could be reproduced independently? Recycling gradually transformed from an economic activity into a subsidized waste-management service, and even enormous subsidies could not keep pace with the material entering the system. Landfills filled in months, then weeks. The first “superdump” opened in the Australian interior in 2037. China excavated enormous disposal pits in the Gobi. The United States designated portions of Nevada for continental waste storage. Old open-pit mines became convenient receptacles, filled to their rims and covered with soil, only for new pits to be excavated beside them.

For a time, burial appeared to offer a permanent solution, and the idea was almost embarrassingly straightforward. There was no reason a landfill had to remain a landfill. Waste could be compressed into enormously dense foundations, covered beneath layers of crushed rock and duplicated soil, landscaped, and eventually built upon. A dump could become a hill; a sufficiently large dump could become a plateau. Coastal nations proposed using waste to create new land, while several governments envisioned entire artificial islands resting on compacted material that earlier generations would have considered garbage. Humanity had always reshaped the surface of the Earth, proponents argued. Duplication merely allowed it to do so faster. The problem appeared when geophysicists stopped calculating in cubic kilometers and began calculating in kilograms. Traditional waste had merely moved matter from one location on Earth to another. Duplicated waste was different. Every discarded automobile, building, appliance and kilometer of synthetic fabric represented mass that had not previously existed on Earth at all. Burial therefore did not simply rearrange the planet. It made the planet heavier.

At first the numbers were reassuring. Earth weighed approximately six sextillion tonnes. Humanity could manufacture on a scale beyond anything its ancestors had imagined and still add only an infinitesimal fraction to the planet's mass. But production was not increasing linearly. Each duplicator could create components for more duplicators, which supplied societies whose appetite for material goods was itself increasing as the psychological memory of scarcity disappeared. When researchers projected those growth curves across centuries rather than years, the results stopped being funny. Under conservative assumptions, humanity would eventually add enough mass to produce measurable changes in surface gravity. More aggressive projections showed consequences for Earth's moment of inertia and rotational dynamics as artificial landmasses accumulated unevenly across its surface. The most extreme scenarios suggested that centuries of uncontrolled duplication could measurably perturb the Earth-Moon system and, over sufficiently long periods, alter Earth's orbit. Nobody could say exactly when those thresholds would be crossed because nobody could predict consumption centuries into the future, but the conclusion was impossible to escape: Earth could not be humanity's garbage container forever, because humanity was no longer merely filling the container. It was manufacturing more container.

By 2038, consumer culture had meanwhile mutated into something earlier generations would have found pathological. Houses were no longer renovated; they were replaced. Some wealthy families changed homes seasonally, having the previous structure disassembled by autonomous machinery and carried away. Cars became disposable fashion accessories. Passenger aircraft were retired after three years. Cruise ships lasted five. Furniture sometimes lasted weeks. The average citizen of a wealthy country disposed of more physical mass in a year than a twentieth-century citizen had consumed in a lifetime, while rapidly rising living standards elsewhere meant billions more people were joining the same system. Humanity needed somewhere to put a civilization's waste that was not Earth, and fortunately duplication had also solved energy.

The Kilimanjaro Mass Driver was completed in 2039, an electromagnetic launch system climbing from equatorial Africa into a tethered orbital complex, followed by related facilities in Indonesia and Ecuador. Waste was compressed into standardized blocks, accelerated beyond Earth and placed on trajectories toward the Sun. The initial quantities were modest, but the system scaled beautifully: duplicate the launchers, duplicate the power systems, duplicate the orbital tugs, duplicate everything except the land beneath them. The solution was hailed as elegant. The Sun contained 99.8 percent of the mass of the solar system, and against something so incomprehensibly large, humanity's garbage was nothing. For a while, that was true.

The forties became the golden age of abundance. Cheap spacecraft opened the solar system. A lunar city intended for twelve thousand residents grew to two million because there was no meaningful reason not to expand it. Mars received oceans of machinery. Venus acquired floating research settlements. Asteroid mining, briefly predicted to become the next great industry, was rendered economically pointless almost before it began; humans no longer went to the asteroids for resources, but because they could. The first generation born after duplication found stories about scarcity almost incomprehensible. Teachers had to explain why people once repaired appliances. Museums displayed grocery coupons, ration cards and gasoline cans. Children laughed at videos showing people waiting overnight to purchase newly released telephones. Economists increasingly divided history into two eras, Scarcity and Abundance, and by the middle of the century the distinction seemed as fundamental as agriculture or industrialization.

By 2059, the Solar Waste Authority was launching billions of tonnes of material into the Sun every year, and the waste itself had changed. It was no longer primarily household garbage. Entire industrial complexes were disposable. Orbital habitats were replaced when superior designs became available. In 2057, Singapore Orbital Three, population 84,000, was evacuated after twenty-two years of service because its replacement offered fourteen percent more usable interior volume. Recycling the old station would have taken eighteen months, so they threw it into the Sun. The first warnings came from solar physicists. The additional mass remained microscopic relative to the Sun itself and by conventional astrophysical models should have been irrelevant, but the material entering the Sun was not behaving conventionally. Decades of duplicated matter carried subtle energetic properties associated with the extradimensional mechanism that had created it, and those effects accumulated inside the solar plasma, altering magnetic circulation in ways nobody had predicted.

Solar storms intensified. In 2061, a flare destroyed thirty percent of Earth's orbital infrastructure. In 2062, another produced auroras visible at the equator and induced currents that melted sections of the Eurasian electrical grid. In 2063 came the Carrington Event, named with grim irony after its comparatively harmless nineteenth-century predecessor. Satellites burned, lunar communications failed, hundreds of orbital habitats lost power, Earth's upper atmosphere expanded under the bombardment and dragged thousands of objects from orbit, while radiation levels across several Martian settlements exceeded emergency limits. Humanity stopped feeding the Sun, but the garbage remained. Engineers proposed destroying matter through controlled conversion, but every method either failed or produced dangerous quantities of energy. Governments attempted mandatory durability standards and limits on duplication, provoking furious public opposition. People who had spent thirty years regarding material abundance as a basic human right did not appreciate being told they could have only one new automobile per year, while industries whose entire business models depended upon perpetual redesign fought the restrictions just as fiercely.

The eventual solution seemed beautifully simple: space was enormous. A stream of autonomous tugs began carrying compressed waste beyond Neptune, accelerating it onto trajectories that would take it permanently away from the inhabited solar system. There would be no pollution, no contaminated planet, no angry voters and no dangerous interaction with the Sun. Compared with the complexities of atmospheric chemistry or stellar magnetism, throwing something into interstellar darkness seemed almost foolproof. By 2080, tens of billions of tonnes were leaving the system annually; by 2120, quadrillions were. The designers had anticipated that the waste streams would disperse through interstellar space, but because launches followed efficient trajectories and civilization produced far more waste than anyone had imagined possible, the material remained loosely concentrated. Its collective gravity became measurable, and engineers adjusted subsequent trajectories to take advantage of it. If the garbage was already attracting garbage, why fight it?

Thus began the Accretion Program. For more than a century, humanity deliberately aimed its unwanted matter toward a growing artificial body several thousand astronomical units from the Sun. Nobody regarded it as dangerous. It was impossibly distant, and its mass was still trivial by astronomical standards, until on September 3, 2185, observatories throughout the solar system detected neutrinos from the object. Hours later, the Waste Aggregate ignited. Humanity had built a star. There were celebrations, and it was difficult not to celebrate; nothing comparable had ever been accomplished. A species that two centuries earlier had struggled to place people on its own moon had manufactured enough matter to initiate stellar fusion. The new star was faint but clearly visible from Earth, a reddish point that had not existed in any ancestral sky. People named it Prometheus. Astronomers preferred WA-1.

The garbage continued because there was nowhere else for it to go, and Prometheus appeared capable of absorbing essentially unlimited quantities. New launch corridors were established. Waste from Mars, the Belt, the Jovian settlements and hundreds of orbital habitats streamed outward toward humanity's artificial star. By 2268, Prometheus had become one of the strangest objects ever observed. Its mass was increasing faster than that of any naturally forming star known to science. Its internal chemistry was absurd, containing concentrations of heavy elements that should never have existed inside a young star. More troublingly, much of its substance consisted of duplicated matter, carrying the same poorly understood extradimensional properties that had destabilized the Sun two centuries earlier. Models of its future lifespan varied wildly; some predicted millions of years, while others predicted centuries. The garbage continued.

Human civilization expanded farther. Colonies spread through the Oort Cloud and eventually to nearby stars, carrying duplicators with them because nobody seriously contemplated abandoning the technology that had ended poverty, cured resource wars, opened space and given ordinary human beings material lives once reserved for emperors. Prometheus grew behind them, and by 2654 it was dying. The phrase made little sense to the public. Stars were supposed to live for billions of years, but Prometheus had never really been a star. It was a gravitational landfill containing centuries of duplicated alloys, polymers, ceramics, hydrocarbons, radioactive isotopes, abandoned spacecraft, obsolete habitats, demolished cities, unwanted furniture, trillions of discarded machines and quantities of exotic matter that had never existed in nature. Its core convulsed, fusion migrated through unstable layers, its brightness oscillated, and great plumes of material erupted millions of kilometers into space before collapsing back upon themselves.

Humanity finally stopped sending it garbage, although by then this was approximately as useful as turning off a faucet after flooding a continent. There were proposals to dismantle Prometheus, which revealed how completely duplication had distorted human intuition. Engineers seriously discussed constructing planetary-scale engines and removing pieces of the star. Others proposed feeding it carefully selected matter to stabilize its fusion cycle. Nothing worked, and Prometheus continued collapsing. The last stage took longer than civilizations once lasted. By 2900, humanity had accepted that the artificial star would eventually undergo catastrophic gravitational collapse. By 3000, evacuation programs were underway throughout the original solar system. Earth was treated increasingly as a historical preserve rather than the center of civilization. Great archives were copied and transported outward, ecosystems were reconstructed on distant worlds, and humans debated whether abandoning Earth constituted an act of cowardice or maturity. Yet billions remained, because Earth was Earth.

In 3111, Prometheus collapsed. For several hours it became brighter than anything humanity had ever placed in the sky, and then the light vanished. At its center was a black hole. The immediate danger was not that the black hole would somehow vacuum up the solar system; gravity did not work that way, and humanity had learned enough physics to know it. The catastrophe was subtler and much worse. Prometheus had accumulated such extraordinary mass, and its long interaction with the strange physics of duplicated matter had altered its trajectory so substantially, that the newly formed black hole was already gravitationally bound to the Sun. The two objects began falling toward one another, and there was no meaningful way to stop them.

The final evacuation lasted generations. Most of humanity escaped, scattering outward toward colonies whose duplicators ensured that no settlement would ever lack food, medicine, machinery or shelter. Some refused to leave Earth. Others remained deliberately on Mars, Luna and the old orbital cities, arguing that a civilization should have witnesses at its own funeral. Eventually the black hole passed through the outer solar system. Planetary orbits distorted. Neptune was expelled first, Uranus followed, and Jupiter's moons scattered. Earth experienced years in which seasons arrived at the wrong times and constellations visibly shifted as the planet's orbit stretched into a fatal ellipse. Then the Sun and Prometheus met.

Humanity watched from other stars, although the images took years to arrive. In the final recordings, the Sun elongated into an incandescent stream around the darkness humanity had made, spilling across millions of kilometers before disappearing beyond the event horizon. The planets followed according to the mathematics of their ruined orbits. Earth survived longer than expected, circling the growing black hole through several increasingly eccentric revolutions before finally vanishing into it. Fourteen billion human beings watched the delayed transmission. There was no monument to Earth afterward because monuments had become strangely unfashionable.

There was, however, a small museum on a planet orbiting Tau Ceti. Its oldest exhibit was protected behind several layers of transparent material and guarded continuously, although the object itself was worthless. It was a platinum cylinder weighing 4.2 grams. Beside it sat another, perfectly identical. The placard explained that nobody knew which one was the original.

NRJ (nrj.ie) joins Field Notes and Radar Signals as observational streams into Marshall on Policy.

Accumulated briefings in Marshall on Policy are transferred to and elaborated on Brief Me. From January 2027 onwards The ConTXT will place the content of Brief Me in context with current events.

For the last several years, I have been an online musician of the indie type. I have gotten so much marketing (even this morning) about image, brand, yada, yada. Have you ever looked up what brand means?

“What is a brand name, Google?”

What a Brand Is vs. What It Is Not

Many people confuse a brand with design elements.

• Not a brand: A logo, a color palette, a website design, or a slogan. According to theAmerican Marketing Association, these are visual assets and marketing tools, not the brand itself. 
• The actual brand: As defined onWikipedia, a brand is the intangible collection of memories, emotions, and expectations a customer associates with a seller. It is what people say about you when you are not in the room.

Core Components of a Brand * Customer Experience: Every interaction a person has with your company—from answering a phone call to unboxing a product. * Identity and Personality: The distinct human traits and values assigned to a business (for example, rugged and bold, or sleek and modern). * Promise: The unspoken guarantee of quality, consistency, and value a customer expects every time they choose you. 

Why Brands Matter

• Differentiation: They help people instantly tell your product apart from cheaper or generic competitors.
• Trust and Loyalty: Strong emotional connections make customers stick with a company over time.
• Economic Value: Recognized brands command higher prices and build long-term financial worth.

Blunt talk with Kelly K. 

Listen, I’ll be blunt. If you happen to be thinking about this stuff while writing a song, you are thinking about the wrong stuff unless your song is about brands. Then send it my way. If you are advertising your music using “consistency, trust, loyalty, value” as guideposts, what the hell are you doing? Art isn’t economical, even cheap art. We do it because we love it, I thought. But marketers out there want me to feel like an entrepreneur, and I most certainly am not that, pardon your French. I am a music contractor, that’s all. That’s all I want, and I got it.

The big consistency lie.

Many of these marketers will harp on “consistency.” They don’t know the meaning of the word. They are looking for quick bucks with you. Ever think about who needs consistency? Corporations love it.  But does any kind of art? Even the most consistently cool artists like Miles Davis invented a new genre every decade or so. That is not consistent. He was hell on promoters, tour managers, and women. He was a nightmare in many regards. Very turbulent. One of the best. Never consistent. 

Bob Dylan doesn’t have a consistent bone in his body. He does whatever the hell he wants. 70’s Dylan is my favorite. But it is very much different than other decades in his career. To call Bob Dylan consistent is a bold-faced lie. He can’t even find a consistent guitar player.

Those have been among my favorite musicians in my whole life. Not consistent, so I haven’t worried about that in years.

But you know who was consistent? Elvis.

Elvis Presley couldn’t write his way out of a paper bag. 

“What Elvis songs did Elvis write, Google?”

Elvis Presley did not write his own music, but he is credited as a genuine co-writer on just two tracks: "That's Someone You Never Forget" and "You'll Be Gone." 

The Truth About Elvis's Credits

• Real Co-Writes: Elvis helped conceptualize or write lyrics for "That's Someone You Never Forget" (with Red West) and "You'll Be Gone" (with Red West and Charlie Hodge). 
• Fake Credits for Hits: Early hits like "Heartbreak Hotel," "Don't Be Cruel," and "All Shook Up" list Elvis as a co-writer, but he did not actually write them. His manager, Colonel Tom Parker, demanded writer credits and royalties for Elvis as a condition of him recording the tracks. 
• His Own View: Elvis openly admitted this practice, stating in interviews that he got credit just for recording a song which "makes me look smarter than I am." 

Ladies and germs, Elvis is a true brand name. Not only did he have some kind of factory going for crappy old hits, he had a very capitalist manager. His manager is still known to some as a marketing “genius”, (gag a maggot) .. Enter: “The Colonel” Tom Parker.

Tom Parker, Music, Brands.

Tom Parker had a mysterious background involving immigration, citizenship, and traveling. He was an illegal Dutch immigrant. Many think this played a significant role in explaining later actions. Why he was scared to leave the country. Even why he was sued by the Elvis estate after Elvis died. But there’s no doubt, he came up with clever cash delivery vehicles. 

Once such method involved buttons. He had buttons that say “I love Elvis” made. He also had buttons that say “I hate Elvis” made. He knew how to market Elvis to folks who hated him and profit from them. See, Tom Parker was a music version of a micro-targeter. In fact, I venture to say, he would have loved micro-targeting. I wonder if he helped invent micro-targeting in some thought process kind of way. Micro-targeting is data-driven, but the concept behind it is a lot like those buttons.

If you don’t want to write songs and swing your hips and you want to hire a manager you are going to fire and even sue for robbing you later on, by all means, call yourself a brand. But if you want to write songs and relate to folks, brands do not do that. People do.

Maybe we’re all terribly lonely, anyone ever thought of that? And it’s by design?

Being lonely makes us consumers, the crowd, the target audience, and it makes us predictable. This is all wonderful stuff for brands with a data contractor. They have tons to dig up from our private lives and throw in our face, guaranteeing a response. They have recognition and years of being in business despite not being the same businesses years ago. Some folks won’t even hang out with folks who like different “brands” of music, politics, church, even food, or home goods. One person didn’t talk to me anymore because I ate at a chain owned by MAGA’s. Fried chicken, I am going to MAGA’s for fried chicken. If there’s any one thing I trust them for, it is that. I think MAGA’s making southern fried chicken is a good use of MAGA skills. Why would I not support that? Plus, I live in Texas. I couldn’t even get power to the house if I boycotted every MAGA, silly asses.

The way they do it.

A demographic is a specific group of people or a set of statistical characteristics used to describe a human population. 

What Tom Parker and everyone in business and politics want is demographics. These folks want to know what their average customer looks like, what color they are, what church they go to, the sexes are a biggie, where they live, and age too. Demographics are a marketing tool that helps you know where you are doing good and where you could focus. Politicians and businesses alike will customize their message depending on who you are. They essentially say one thing to white women and another thing to black men. Now, keep in mind, I don’t think this is wrong. I don’t necessarily think white women and black men need the same message. Having said that, it is entirely possible they don’t need the same politician, either. If we are talking music especially. Those two crowds are not listening to the same stations. But it’d sure be easier to sell them both songs if they did. Politics is like that.

The point is out there about musicians and brand now. Let’s bring it home.

What do you think being a musician is?

The best way I can tell you to figure out what you want in music is to figure out what someone you like did, and do that your own way. Much like writing a tune might inspire another, careers in music do this too. We used to have apprenticeships to guarantee music for folks when we die, but recording and other factors tore down taking other younger folks in and showing them around on nice stuff. This is a shame. I am very grateful to all the “boomers” who worked with me and showed me anything. I’d be crap without that, and better with more of it.

To me, being a musician is that. It’s teaching. To you? It might be industry. It might be escape. It could be simply something to do. Only one of those things out of anything I can think of is a “Brand Name.”  So while marketers are keen to tell you about brands, they are hoping to resonate with your frustration, not your aspirations.  So many musicians seem weary and frustrated; they think industry is a way to get more people. What musicians do not realize is this mentality makes them vulnerable to micro-targeting. 

It’s not about music, it’s about being lonesome.

If you are lonely, you are vulnerable. It doesn’t matter how smart, how talented, how chipper. It matters how lonely. That is their invitation.

Maybe avoid marketers and work on the lonesome issue? Just a thought.

Thanks.

Kelly Kintner

The Horse’s Mouth Magazine

While I was landing, I looked over at San Jose from the airplane, and I felt a similar pang of sadness. Every time I’ve come back here, it has felt less strong, and I guess I feel like a lot of it is probably because of my memories here with my ex and her family. And every time I have faced it, it has been more and more quiet. I also think part of me just doesn’t really like this city too much, but I’m glad that things are getting easier. It’s also a little bit weird because for the first time, a friend is not available to hang out, usually I hang out with two specific friends when I come up here for two days, and both of them are gone for business trips. I’m going to be interested seeing what I do with my time.

5.

Une scène terrible. Ma mère en travers d’une porte, empêchant mon père de sortir. Elle crie elle pleure. J’ai peur, je me cache sous la table. Mon père partait souvent, parfois pendant des semaines, il se rendait dans des villages loin, dans la forêt pour je ne sais quelles activités. Ma mère, dans un lit, son abondante chevelure brune aux reflets cuivrés répandue autour de son visage comme une auréole de sainte. On ne doit pas faire de bruit. Maman est en dépression.

Le père de ma grand mère était mort. Sa grande maison brûlée. Pillées les récoltes, les hangars détruits. Décidément, ma famille ne retrouverait jamais ni ses terres ni ses biens. C’était fini, terminé. Hanoï tombée, le Viêt Nam était virtuellement coupé en deux, un accord de coopération militaire fut signé entre la France et ce qui subsistait de l’Indochine.

La famille dépendait à présent essentiellement de l’argent continuant par bonheur à arriver de la métropole.

#nguolai