Greetings and Happy New Year! We return to something like regularity with the podcast next week, starting with the brilliant Carl Hayden Smith. Thanks for your patience, although I know there has been plenty else to chew on. But first!

Weird Academics Unite!

I’ll be at IU Bloomington in a few weeks for an historic congregation of scholars and artists at The Center for Possible Minds’s Weird Academia series, hanging out with inspiring folks like Erik Davis, Jeff Kripal, JF Martel, Phil Ford, Jacob Foster, Erica Cartmill, Cat Hobaiter, and Shannon Taggart (for whom I’m going to provide some ambience for her gallery opening of spirit medium photography). My friend and fellow Weirdosphere faculty member Emma Stamm and I are organizing a daytime colloquium for other scholars and artists compelled to work on topics institutions typically regard as “fringe” and welcome you to join us if you’re in the area!

Reach out to us here if you’re interested.

And now the meat and potatoes:

New Live Instrumental Ephemera

Today’s my 42nd birthday today and as is tradition, here’s a reverse birthday present for everyone—just a short little live improv session from a fun event in a wonderful community space last year. Here is fifteen minutes of electronic guitar ambience performed at Make Santa Fe for CreativeMornings‘s event on innovation with a talk by Make’s Executive Director James W. Johnson.

Nothing fancy: 15 minutes of chill instrumental tunes I cooked up on the spot, available for free only on Bandcamp. (I’ll be pulling all my music off of Spotify soon, and uploading new stuff to Subvert.fm ASAP, but for now…) Enjoy!

Setting the Scene for Live at Make Santa Fe

Imagine that it’s 9 a.m. on 12 December 2025, just off a dirt road, in tiny warehouse where this city learns how to do awesome things with awesome tools. You are in a room filled with 3D printers, CNC machines, a robotic shop vac, and a handmade flame organ...the smells of coffee, metal, and sawdust, and the warmth of a small crowd of passionate creators, fills the air. There is no stage, because real innovation happens on an even footing. A janky battery-powered PA balanced precariously on a shop stool is enough to fill the space with fifteen minutes of improvised electric wanderings inspired by vibe and conversation: additive manufacturing, creative process, iterative exploration.

And now you’re ready to tune in to how I channeled the community and architecture, and left a kind of 3D print of what Johnson noted in his talk as raw ingredients for innovation: space, time, resilience, confidence, and humor.

Also, Kind of an IOU and Kind of a Prayer for Peace:

I'm also writing a lot and working on big ideas and awesome teams and ambitious (but grounded, plausible) visions, but that is still also almost all backstage and hopefully soon there will be more to show of all these months of work. Of all the times to be quieter than usual, this one feels especially wrong. But it's also time to work on things of durable value, and chatter in the distraction-verse does not accomplish that.

In the meantime, the one thing I want to make sure does NOT go unsaid is that I love you all, I miss you all, and I want the best for you. The one thing it seems like many of us are not getting enough of lately is each other. Real friendship is an incredibly powerful force. It is the thread that holds the world together when everything else is trying to pull it apart. And the more time we can make for one another, the better. Friendship incubates new and better stories, and we need those. Friendship keeps us sane and healthy, and is a real threat to the systems of oppression and evil that would rather make us strangers, because strangers are easier to manipulate.

For your own sake, for our sake, for my birthday, I hope you see this and immediately log out and spend some time in person with people you love. If you can. It's important to put as little of the machine as possible between us right now, for so many reasons.

Better options for online community than encrypted private messaging like Signal (I’m @futurefossils.888) will come soon. I have hope for this world because in my line of work I see people working toward better ways of doing and being all the time. I know the needs are being answered, even if it's happening slower than we'd like. And I want to share some of that hope with you. With any luck the dam will break soon and I'll have so much more to say about all of the reasons I feel confident we're going to look back on this in a few years as "those crazy decades we thought were never going to end." But for now, take heart, and stay in touch.

I am grateful for so much and for so many. Y'all give me many reasons to be grateful. Don't be a stranger.