Linked by the NYT

General Updates, Pics of a Baby, and Subscriber Voting Polls

Linked by the New York Times

Among my various writer-based achievements, my proudest and most surreal¹ —that I can verify— remains that Devon Sawa and Kate Siegel once did a podcast narration of one of my horror stories. I was giving my son a bath at the time the reddit notification came up and I immediately abandoned him to fate and called my sister —who once had a large poster of Devon Sawa above her bed— to tell her that Casper had read my work.

Well, folks, we have a brand new anecdote!

Yours truly was linked —at the very bottom of a list of links— by the New York Times! This happened a few days after my second son was born so I was pretty tired, but still! Hot-diggety dog! I had slept enough to slightly raise my eyebrows and even my TikTok-loving wife cared enough to say “That’s the really big newspaper, right?”

I have absolutely no idea how significant this is or how I should feel about it in writerly terms. It was my “mystical experience” piece again. My piece wasn’t directly mentioned at all but was included as a sort of “hey, here’s a neat link.” You can read the NYT piece by clicking this link.

If you are brand new, please use this piece as a directory for all of my stuff worth reading. I have also added new tabs to keep a running table of contents for my work by type.

Hopefully, next time I get linked from the NYT it will be for Trust Assembly stuff and it will mention that I am very enigmatic and keep out of the public eye.

For the purposes of the substack, we will call the new guy Finn. This is him being annoyed that I’m listening to podcasts while burping him.

Adventures in Child-Rearing

I will be forty next year. That makes me an old dad. In previous generations, my children would be getting ready to move out instead of just being born. And I probably would have had many more of those hypothetical children if I’d started earlier. Lay the population crisis at my feet, I suppose, but my wife and I are doing our best to make up for lost time.

Or, since I’m in my Prince Hal era I guess you could say:

“I'll so offend to make offence a skill, Redeeming time when men think least I will. Dost thou speak like a king? Do thou stand for me, and I'll play my father. Depose Me?”

I think the thing I didn’t understand in earlier years is how much your children force you to grow up. I kept waiting to be ready, to fix myself, or some other thing. It’s more like you take a leap and then a wind pushes on your back to get you to the other side. You don’t get to know at the time you get pushed off the cliff whether or not that wind will come. And yet the whole future, indeed the whole world, depends upon you taking that leap.

It’s not that you are perfectly motivated to do all of these things and then you have kids. It’s that you have kids and you discover within yourself an incredible motivation to set the world to right for them. You want to do what is right for your babies and you feel that so strongly you’ll do all kinds of things you never thought you’d do before.

My wife felt that way when we got to the hospital too late for her to get pain medication. This was after a few weeks of false starts. With our first it was very much a “oh, this is happening” followed by “it happened!” This baby was more like “I think something is going to happen” and “I just ate the Spicy Honey Chicken Pimento sandwich but yeah it’s weird you can see my stomach contracting like that” then “I had contractions for a few days but then they stopped.” Finally, we ran into the hospital and about five minutes after we got to the delivery room our second child appeared.

My oldest son, Dutch, is slowly getting used to having a brother. When Finn was crying in the car the other day, Dutch shouted “Quiet!” which marks a brand new word that we hadn’t known that he knew, and what seems to be the paradigm of their relationship at this stage. The other day when I was changing Finn’s diaper, Dutch tried to push the ottoman on top of us both. He’s two, so I think the police will go easy on him. Once we made him understand he has to be gentle with the baby, he has been attempting to give him comfort by proxy with his Goodnight Gorilla doll. But more in a “please be quiet” way than a “I’m your big brother, let me take care of you” way. I’m sure they will love each other eventually. I just hope eventually is a few years from now instead of several decades.

If I’ve been slow responding to messages, completely forgotten to respond to something or made some kind of embarrassing typo… well, I am writing this at one o’clock in the morning.

Subscriber Voting Polls

Please tell me what you want me to write next. I’m doing one poll for subscribers and another poll for paid subscribers. Also, I’m instituting a rule that if there is a tie I get to decide which piece to write and am only committing to one piece per poll. I will do more than that at my discretion.

In Favor of the Cultural Christianity Movement, or the Story of Josh Chris — which would be a weirdly long piece of religious apologetics and social commentary in response to this piece by Scott Alexander and Astral Codex Ten. And also, the absolutely agony of the Jordan Peterson vs Richard Dawkins moderated by Alex O’Connor, which was the one podcast I’ve most regretted subjecting my children to while they try to just have fun. If you liked my piece on Immortality this will probably take similar directions but somehow be even longer. It would open with a short story of my reimagining of the Bible as being primarily a construction manual. Which, believe it or not, is directly relevant. I’m going to write this one at some point, your vote will just influence how quickly I prioritize it.

The Shadow Library — A piece on how I think we could have meaningful deterrence against Super-Intelligent AI’s in the future. Also, a cool idea for a bar that would probably quickly degenerate into a sex party but would hopefully also have cool AI stuff happening there.

The Intelligence Speed Limit of the Universe — An Essay about the “Ultimate Size of Minds” that will include all kinds of diagrams and things that five people will care about, all of whom are Transhumanists who will refuse to accept the arguments.

Grandma Corrine — the story of my grandmother, who was probably the best person i ever knew. She grew up on a farm in Minnesota. This would feel a lot like “The Man from New York” if you liked that piece.

My Summer on the Drilling Rig — the story of my summer job working on a drilling rig in New Mexico. By far the worst job I’ve ever had and really puts email job stuff into perspective.

If you want to vote for this one, you have to be a paid subscriber. Whatever piece wins here will be paywalled. Click the button if interested.

My Michael Mike — the story of my uncle Mike, a former con-artist turned born again Christian who once lived in a garbage dump in Mexico as part of a scheme to save a very small amount of money on pencil and eraser imports. The title references the way I used to say his name when I mumbled a lot. This would be long and probably have the funniest stuff.

The Divorce Pond — the story of my dad’s fifth divorce and how we had to do all kinds of crazy shit to build a giant pond in his yard because he didn’t want to just be sad. This includes trying to dredge what was basically a small lake with a plastic tarp. Shorter but funny.

The High Cost of Being Dumb — a series of recollections about seeing my parents waste so much money during my childhood and I guess I’ll include how I became “middle class” which mostly involves not going on stupid vacations or buying garbage. This one is funny in a sort of schadenfraude way, like my parents insisting we go to Disneyland but then not having enough money to pay for gas to get home. Explains why to this day all of my siblings hate to go anywhere on vacation.

My Favorite Horror Story — I’ve written very few horror stories that I’m actually proud of but there’s one that inspired at least two people to get tattoos of it. I would provide this for you all. Easy copy and paste for me. I’ll likely do this anyhow at some point this month.

The Heartbeat in the Woods (Actual thing that happened to me) — I get the shit scared out of me by what I am now pretty sure was a log banging against some rocks in an underground river, but what at the time sounded like a disembodied heartbeat. Happened with my little brother and our neighbor when we were all in grade school. Went out into the middle of the woods, found an empty clearing. I won’t give the whole thing away but Jesus were we spooked. They also both abandoned me to die which was another funny part of it.

1. Bill Nye the Science Guy also once used an anecdote about my life when debating the Creationist Ken Ham. It was an experience where I had to go see a mortician that lived down the road from my uncle Mike in order to tie my necktie for a NASA scholarship interview that I subsequently won. He had requested I lean back because he’d forgotten how to tie the knot otherwise. Which sounds fake, but did happen. I was later informed my actual real-life experience was something that was mentioned fictionally in a Heinlein short story that I still haven’t read and was very rudely written before I was born, so it’s possible that Bill Nye could have referenced that when he mentioned “the internet.” Also, the entire horror series “The Purge” may have been based on a short story I wrote. I was very excited about that until I discovered that “murder night” had also been the plot of an episode of classic Star Trek.