May 2026

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8,642 words

May, 2026

May 1 I just wrote this description in a rush, trying to submit my manuscript to the Library of Congress. It's mostly shit, but there's something good here.

Book Summary:

A young American goes on a solo adventure to Iceland. He camps outside for an entire summer, hiking all around the country, learning about Iceland's geology, language, and culture. During the adventure, he matures, and wisdom is imparted to him by the people he meets and by Nature.

Additional Info:

This is probably best classified as a travel memoir, but the chapters read like personal essays, alternating between narrative action and philosophical reflection.

May 2 Notes on Project Hail Mary (Movie)

I was engrossed the entire time, surprised by it being mostly a comedy, and totally impressed by the fact that it was so engaging considering the only scenes outside the spaceship(s) were flashbacks.

Subverts sci-fi tropes of everything being dire and serious, especially the idea that the main character is a willing adventurer/hero/martyr.
Makes me empathize with and care about a rock-alien with no face, and for me to care about the fate of his species/planet—that's a real feat! (Sort of reminds me of the relationship between Cooper and TARS in Interstellar.)
Has such a simultaneously simple and complex plot, especially the concept of Astrophage, and its "predator" Taomoeba.
Brilliantly delivered exposition, steady drip of information via flashbacks and real-time problem-solving in space.
Plot hole: The exo-star is 11.5 light-years away, so why did the ship say that it would take him only 4 years to return to Earth?
Plot hole: Why was Rocky able to modulate his voice and impersonate Sylvester Stalone's character Rocky? The computer is just saying the words that it recognizes, not the inflection/intonation, etc.
Unanswered question: How long was Grace awake before shipping off the probes (how long did it take him and Rocky to figure it all out)? And how long did it take the probes to reach Earth?
Plot hole: Grace and Rocky were learning each other's languages word by word, not syllable by syllable, so how could Grace have possibly known what Rocky's home planet or race is called? Why not just show the few seconds of a scene where Grace assigns Rocky's species and planet an English name?
Love the ambiguous (also full-circle) ending with Grace on the Eridians' planet.
The language-learning sequence was clearly borrowed from Arrival, but this book/movie still made it unique by taking it less seriously, making it easier and less technical (but also less deep).

May 3 Faith is healing, but it is not medicine.

May 4 So quickly clarity comes to confuse.

// So quickly clarity comes to confusion.

// So quickly bright becomes blinding.

Slight edit of Nan Sheperd's words deom the end of the "Snow" chapter of The Living Mountain:

So quick the bright things come to confusion.

This idea reminds of that Plato quote about the two causes of blindness: darkness or light in excess. Clarity in too great a dose, in too short a time, is confusion.

May 5 A Frictionless Forest

After my first two months of mountain biking, logging several multiple rides per week, I feel qualified to speak on the subject, to speak to the experience.
I finally feel comfortable on the burn-turns. I'm finally not squeezing my breaks all the way through them but rather shifting my bike and my weight and trusting the tread of my tires. My top speed so far, which I achieved today, is 20 mph—faster than even the squirrels, only rivaled by the birds.
On a single-track bike path, hands and 'bows akimbo, one feels avian, gliding through trees. (But in my case, avoiding limbs and trees as I "fly" is rather effortful rather than the fleet red robin, for whom the task is effortless.
As I rode today, as I approached a right-banking burn on a flowy downhill section, I suddenly imagined my bike as being stationary and the entire earth turning beneath me. It was easy, just as easy as it is to shift one's focus from the pitcher's mound to one's fingers curled through the dugout's chain-link fence. Instead of watching a skydiver from the ground, I was jumping out with him, watching the ground rush at us.
Going downhill, I imagined myself riding east, with the spin of the earth; and I imagined riding uphill as riding west, when the entire world seems to be turning away from me, denying me progress, threatening to kill my momentum and make me waddle or walk.
By contrast, the landscape when skiing through trees feels static, as if I am the only thing in the world unfrozen. On most days in the trees, not even snowflakes are blown along the ground. All pigment comes from the bare aspen or birch, or from evergreen pines, and the only visible fauna are birds. In snow, it feels, the birds are far too fleet for me. I am a snail leaving a winding slime-trail, whereas the birds are invisible as soon as I spot one. There are fewer obstacles when the dicidudi are dormant—for them but not for me.
The best-feeling turns on a bike are similar to those on skis in that the frictionless apparatus seems to bend around my body, in a tight, high-frequency, helical orbit: weight on your outside pedal, outside ski; bend sideways at the hip to keep your torso upright rather than keeling towards the ground, flattening out; keep your arms and hands square out in front of you, don't let one side lag or lead.
I have yet to get real air on a mountain bike. So far, I have only gotten my front tire off the ground. In the winter, on skis, we'd call that a tail-butter, which is a worthy trick itself. But in MTB, that's called a half-assed attempt at a jump.
The many miniature impacts of rocks and roots poke through my sit-bones at my lower back and agitate my natural shocks there. My spinal erectors get bullied from skiing too, because I can actually get air on skis and the many impacts send waves up my posterior chain, but the location of the pain in MTB is lower and more concentrated: lumbar only, whereas with skiing, after four days straight or so, I usually feel tension up and down my entire thoracic. When I stop to take breaks while biking, while still straddling the bike's frame, I push the handle bars forward and knead the pointy end of the seat into the junction of my spinal erectors and hip bones. I twist and crack and back-band too, briefly, before I start peddling again.
It took me too long to learn the difference between the sound of a squirrel fleeing from me and that of a deer. I love watching the bobbing white tail of a deer as it moves through the woods. For a while, I would look (as I was riding, sometimes in the middle of a turn) at the sound of a squirrel, disappointed to not see a deer. Now, I know the sounds well enough to not be distracted by the squirrels and to not miss a single deer, and I can say that Prancer is a much more apt name for a deer than Dasher. The squirrels are dashers: darters, hustlers, rustlers, whirlers, and blurs. The squirrels are the comets too. I guess Santa's names make more sense for flying deer, but the earth-bound doe sautés through the woods like a prima ballerina across stage.
Placing the ball of my feet not the pedals is like finding four seams on a baseball before throwing over to first.
I have never experienced that visual illusion of being stationary on skis, as I have on a mountain bike, perhaps because a winter forest is so still that I cannot imagine it moving. Warm forests hum and huff like a bull behind a gate. It is not so hard to imagine the entire spring forest charging at me.

[[On Frictionless Sports and My Introduction to Mountain Biking]]

May 6 I started my day by reading a couple stories from the Borges collection Labyrinth: "Three Versions of Judas" and "The Circular Ruins." I love this one-liner from the latter, a trippy, dream-within-a-dream story:

In the dreamer's dream, the dreamed one awoke.

May 8 "It's sad, but it's also beautiful."

"It's sad, and it's all so beautiful."

May 9 A better title for my essay about the penultimate beat of any media being the most important (climactic):

"Cuddles After Climax: A theory of story structure"

[[My Theory: The Preeminence of the Penultimate]]

May 10 On Brevity and Economy

Why do I prefer lower-page-count works of long-form writing: short stories, essays, novellas? I think it's because the brevity of those forms necessitates the single thing I admire most about any high-quality media or art: economy. How much can one do with how little? Camus's The Stranger comes to mind as one of the best examples, also Borges's short stories and Dillard's essays.

Why do I champion economy and filter for it? Probably because I read or consume books so intensely; I chew on every word, never inhaling sentences for their raw content. I am always doubly concerned as I read: both with the notation and with the connotations (and often meta-concerned with the craft of writing behind the words).

Shorter-form works of literature reward my natural and preferred reading style. I treat every word—not every sentence or paragraph or page—as meaningful in the utmost sense and consider it individually, also phonetically in my mind's ear in context of the sentence and paragraph. Essays, short stories, and novellas are mediums optimized for economy; the primary craft in them is how to make each word do more work, matter more, be more strongly tied to the main thread.

Finally, I find that shorter works tend to be more philosophically or conceptually driven. There is a point that is never lost or shrouded. The entire work exists to communicate something, and every word contributes to that very purpose, whereas with a sprawling novel, there is another competing purpose of engrossing/immersing the reader in a world for its own sake, irrespective of the point.

Yes, I'm not too stiff to enjoy art for its own sake, like reading a poem that is totally opaque to me but is delightful to read aloud. But I find that I enjoy literature more if I am not only being engrossed and entertained but also taught. I read to learn, and some of my favorite works of words have few pages yet have truth leaking from every line of print.

As a reader I seek economy, so too as a writer, since I only want to write what I would love to read.

Note: Not all brief works are great—i.e., dense with meaning and truth—but the ones that are both brief and great achieve that through a special skill of economy.

May 11 My email to the Buttondown team, trying to get them to convince me to leave Substack (because it's so tempting to stay), even though I hate what they're doing to the place:

Subject: I'm Done with Substack But Tempted to Stay

Hi Buttondown team,

This was my first newsletter platform, starting in 2021, before I switched to Substack, and I think it will be my last (after I switch back from Substack).

I have already decided to migrate my personal list, but I am hesitant to start my business's newsletter on Buttondown, because I worry about losing out on the network-effects and organic growth from Substack. I'm a writing coach and editor and will soon launch a newsletter on writing/editing, and Substack has a built-in audience for that content.

I have two main questions:

If I promoted my Buttondown newsletter on Substack Notes, would the conversions be better than I think? I worry those rates would be much lower than native Substack subscriptions.
I plan for this to be a free newsletter, so the most attractive Buttondown feature is the drip campaigns and automations. What else would I be missing if I stayed with Substack that would outweigh the benefits of its promise of organic growth and network-effects?

I love what you guys are doing and, opposite Substack, your updates actually improve your product rather than corrupt it. Thank you for that. I'm hoping you can convince me to migrate wholesale.

All the best,

Garrett Kincaid

Updating My Tech Stack

I'm mostly happy with the services and tech I use to run everything, but there are some key tweaks to make that would make me feel more like a professional and make my systems much smoother.

At least while I build my new personal site, I'm going to pay for Claude Pro ($20) and use Claude Code to set up my entire slick system to create a static site from my local .md files.

Current Tech Stack Free (or one-time)

Idea-capture: Drafts
Drafting (for online): Typora
Drafting (for print): Scrivener
Newsletter: Substack
Calendar: Notion Calendar

Paid (monthly)

Website: Notion + Super.so
Conferencing: Zoom
Forms: Tally
Calendar Bookings: Calendly
Video-Messages: Loom
Design Software: Adobe InDesign

Revisions to Tech Stack Free

Website: Custom static site, built with 11ty, hosted with Cloudfare
[NEW] Cloudfare Email Routing (instead of paying for Google Workspace)

Paid

Newsletter: Buttondown
[NEW] AI Assistant: Claude (Code)

These changes will significantly help me shift toward more autonomy, ownership, and customizability of my online presence and my writing workflows.

May 12 New Newsletter System

Important Idea: I could solve all my logistical issues by turning The Intronaut into a proper old-school-style personal newsletter. Right now, I'm finding these containers limiting, especially the idea of separating my writing from my business. They ought to intertwined.

I also don't like the idea of double-posting my essays on my site and on Substack, for instance. So, what if I just was creating and writing all the time and each month, or maybe biweekly depending on my output, published an issue of The Intronaut that links out to my: published essays, essays on writing and tips for writers, editing offerings to new clients, and my book(s)?

I need to be promoting myself, and I need to be building an email list. I'd rather not have two email newsletters, even though I can segment off some of my subscribers who become leads for my editing business. (But I've already built that.)

If I go this direction, my personal website becomes critical. I would transfer everything to Buttondown, and the newsletter would become more unstructured. It wouldn't be "essays in your inbox" but more like a traditional newsletter, Garrett's newsletter. The body would sometimes be a short essay, an excerpt from a recent essay, a dose of dream-inspired prose poetry, etc. And then there would be several sections linking out to all kinds of things: updates on my business, reflections on writing/editing, updates on my book(s), etc. I would still call it The Intronaut.

As an editor (and self-editor), I try to be sensitive to the reader's wants and needs. For us writers, that means editing our drafts so that when a reader starts, he doesn't want to stop—doesn't need to stop—and feels more engaged with every page, never feeling alienated.

Your reader is a genius. She is constantly making connections, bringing her own ideas and experiences to the text, and is always looking for how she may apply the text to her own life—especially in the case of nonfiction. So, create that space, maintain that distance, so that you can meet your reader somewhere between the lines, where you co-create meaning.

May 13 My responses/notes on Patrick Walsh's "Harder Editing Test" video:

Woman watches man leave for work, knowing there is some tension between them.

No variation of sentence structure and very few dependent clauses; every sentence is S–V–O, with the same subject in each: "Sarah saw," "She watched," "She noticed," "She felt," "She realized," "She knew." So not only are the sentence structures (and sentence lengths) monotonous, but so are the subjects and the verbs of those sentences. There is no action.

My rewrite:

David grabbed his coat from the hook and paused at the door. Sarah heard him sigh, saw his shoulders slump. He didn't turn around. David was waiting for Sarah to speak, and if she didn't, he would leave.

A man receiving bad news at work

Backwards and convoluted order of information, 5x repetition of the word "news" in five sentences, too much telling, no tension or reveal, doubled-up description of how the news hit Tom (one literal ("hard"), one figurative ("like a stone in his chest").

My rewrite:

The news settled into Tom's chest like a stone. He thought about his mortgage, his daughter's college fund. How would he tell his wife? It had to be soon; someone had already leaked the news to the press. Tom stared at the article on his phone. After working at the firm for fifteen years, they were letting him go.

A father learns his son has been hurt at school

This one is not a "sneaky mistake"; it's purple prose: too hyperbolic, too many modifiers.

My rewrite:

Marcus gripped the phone tighter, and tears welled up in his eyes. A wave of sorrow washed over him, crashing into grief.

Two characters have a tense conversation in a kitchen

Similar to the first one—to monotonous rhythmically and with subject and verbs. The action is especially choppy; every small movement is its own sentence: turning, crossing arms, getting up, walking over, looking into her eyes. There's no swell of emotion or action, just slides, stop-motion, stage-direction.

My rewrite:

Stopping at the kitchen counter, Anna stood with her arms crossed, facing Daniel. He set down his coffee mug and walked around the counter: "We need to talk."

A character is being chased through the woods at night

This particular scene should be action-packed, but it immediately gets highjacked by interiority and flashback, disembodied internal monologue that happens to also be unrealistic given the circumstance. In this moment, full of fear, there is no way Eliza would be thinking philosophically about whether her grandma felt this same primal fear during the ware. Those are thoughts that only come upon reflection, not in the midst of the action.

My rewrite:

Branches tore at Eliza's face. She heard heavy footsteps gaining on her. A primal fear was testing her, as it had tested her ancestors. They had endured it and survived. Would she? The heavy footsteps grew louder.

Patrick calls this "unearned interiority," which I quite like—very accurate.

My top five best-designed superhero iterations in film and TV:

Live Action

The Mach III suit in Iron Man (2008)
Toby Maguire's Spider-Man in Spider-Man 2 (2004)
Deadpool in Deadpool (2016)
Bucky Barnes in Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)
Hugh Jackman as Wolverine (with leather jacket) in X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)

Animated

Batman in Batman: The Animated Series (1992–1995)
Batman (Thomas Wayne) in Justine League: The Flashpoint Paradox (2013)
Batman Beyond in Batman Beyond the animated series and movie (1999)
Martian Manhunter in The Justice League animated series (2001–2004)
Beast Boy (and transformations) in Teen Titans (2003–2006)

Hybrid Training Plan Draft (Garage Gym Only)

Pull Day Warm-Up Lat Pull-Ups

Explosive Pull-Ups: 3 x 6–8
Myo-Rep Chin-Ups: 3 x 8–10
Reverse Lunge / S-L Glute Bridge: 3 x 12–15 Superset:
BW Bicep Curls: 2 x 12–15
Hanging Leg/Knee Raises: 2 x 12–15

Push Day Warm-Up: Hindu Push-Ups

Dips: 3 x 12–15
Pike Push-Ups: 3 x 6–8
Sissy Squat / Reverse Nordic: 3 x 8–10 Superset
BW Skull-Crushers / Close-Grip Deficit Push-Ups: 3 x 10–12
Hanging Leg/Knee Raises: 3 x 12–15

Endurance/Cardio: MTB, Running, Tennis Mobility: Yoga

Weekly Plan: 2–4x strength training, 2–4x cardio, 1–2x mobility: 7–10 total training sessions

Pull +/ Cardio
Push
Cardio
Pull
Push +/ Cardio
[Rest]
Cardio/Mobility

May 15 DnD Character-Building

I want to design a one-shot campaign of DnD to play with my boys during my bachelor-party weekend, and I just got off the phone with one my groomsman, on which call we devised the entire system for character building. This will be the most nerdy thing I have ever done.

Set up the campaign/story such that it's a conquest/competition between two teams (e.g., 3 vs. 3). There are three classes: Soldier (DPS), Cavalry (Tank), Mage (Support).

First, run a character-draft from all of fiction.

After everyone has chosen their character, go one by one back down the line and have the whole group brainstorm a nerf for that character. Since everyone knows the premise of the campaign, they know not to nerf any character too hard, because that player may be on their team.

Then, snake back the other way for the second round of the draft, where players choose their class. Soldiers get to choose any item/weapon from fiction. Cavalrymen get to choose any beast or vehicle as a mount. Mages get to choose any special ability. The character's nerf will inform which class the player chooses and which item they could use to counteract the nerf.

The character build is complete once there is a character, nerf, and item/mount/ability (class: soldier/cavalry/mage).

No matter a player's selection, no character will be overpowered, because the character build only informs the stat spread for the character, but all characters will have the same total stat points. These (ideally, funny/crazy fusion character ideas) are mostly in service of story.

Examples

Character: Solid Snake (Phantom Pain) Nerf: Quadriplegic

Item (Soldier): Doc Ock Tentacles—Octoplegic Snake
Mount (Cavalry): Toruk (from Avatar: Fire & Ash)—Snake Sully
Ability: Thu'um (The Voice) from Skyrim—Dragonborn Snake, the Limbless

Character: Avatar Aang (ATLA) Nerf: Size of a sumo wrestler (limiting most of his air-bending skills) Item (Soldier): Hulk-Buster Iron Man Suit Build: Sumo Hulk-Buster Aang

Character: Darth Vader (Maul: Shadow Lord) Nerf: Every time he engages an enemy in combat, his target morphs (in Vader's vision only) into Padmé, wearing the Attack of the Clones break-up outfit. Ability: Daredevil's blindness and Radar Sense Build: Darth Devil

Holy shit! I've been enjoying Silo Season 1 even more than I thought I would, but Episode 7, "The Flamekeepers," ratcheted it up a notch. We got so much action, so much progress, so many answers and new questions, and more chaos in the silo than any episode yet. I am totally hooked and consider this a masterclass in sci-fi mystery, human-spirit-testing, bird-in-a-cage storytelling. I relate deeply and am rooting hard for the main characters, which is a lineage of rebels in a society designed to snuff them out.

May 16 Notes on Silo Season 1

The back half of Silo Season 1 absolutely rips. I hate to admit it, but it's 2 a.m., and I just finished binging episodes 7–10. My least favorite part of the early episodes of this season was the non-linear storytelling and how that affected the pacing, with all the flashbacks and time-jumps creating a bit of a character/plot jumble. But watching these final episodes, I can say that whole early-season set-up is completely justified and executed as well as it could have been. First, all the flashbacks got a lot more interesting once we learn what Judicial is really up to, and then once the flashbacks stop at the end of Ep. 8, the season rockets out of the atmosphere and into orbit. The entire final three episodes are nearly nonstop action and conflict and resolution and mystery-solving and -revealing. The finale is also a perfect bookend to the season, subverting what we've come to think and marking the first major triumph over the powers that be.

May 19 On Whether to Cut or Commit

If you find during the edit that something doesn't fit, the solution isn't always to cut it; sometimes, it means you need to commit to it. Meaning is made in context. Even aphorisms become more rich and multi-layered when they are read among the rest of the paragraphs and pages that surround it. So, if an idea of paragraph or character feels out of place, there is a chance that the best possible version of the essay or chapter is a version with more context for and commitment to that part.

For instance, in the hitchhiking chapter of my Iceland book, I had this section full of back-to-back vignettes of me hitchhiking. They felt too long, felt disconnected, too flat and not enough thematic progress through the section. The question I had to answer was: cut or commit? And I decided that, al though it would require more severe edits, the best version of the chapter was one with all of those vignettes, all of those people represented, and brining the reader with me all the way to my destination. I chose to commit, which meant compressing each vignette and, more importantly, setting up the entire section for success thematically. In my first draft, there was nothing unresolved that remained in the chapter's narrative by the time I got to this final section. So, I re-paced and bumped down one of my key insights about why my debts to "my ferrymen" could not be relayed with money. I saved that big insight and thematic resolution for this section, which gave it a critical purpose.

In my final draft, the vignettes have a momentum. I'm trying to get to the dock before the ferry arrives; time is running out. And there's a thematic momentum, because throughout these rides, I reflect on what I owe these people and how I might repay them. The external and internal conflict crash into each other right at the end of the section, and the chapter, when I get to the dock in time and don't offer money to the people who gave me that last ride, because I learned that the only way to repay my debts was to become a ferryman for others.

The best writing isn't always easy. I worried that I was slowly killing the chapter—or bludgeoning an already dead thing—but I wasn't I committed, and it paid off. This chapter, which was the hardest for me to write and required the most amount of research and revision, was my line-editor's and my dad's favorite chapter—the first two people to read the book.

The clouds I just saw on my way to the woods were funky, psychedelic, captivating, dreamlike. They seemed to originate from a smokestack in the distance to the south, where they were solid gray smoke billowing, then becoming more diffuse, scattering, separating into park-sized pieces. Over me, in the west—in contrast to the matte-blue-glazed porcelain firmament to the east and north—were these clouds like puzzle pieces correctly arranged but not quite connected. They were 3-D pieces, with cavities and convexities, each one textured by the low sun casting shadows back up onto them. A loose puzzle of vapor-pieces floating away from an imaginary smoke stack.

May 20 Here's another step-by-step edit of a sentence in my book that has already been rewritten probably five times (oldest at top).

The ocean was a crop field ripe for harvest, white-caps refracting light like mature wheat spikes rustling in the wind.

The ocean was a crop field ripe for harvest; white-caps reflected light like mature wheat spikes rustling in the wind.

The ocean was a crop field ripe for harvest; white-caps reflected light like mature wheat spikes waving in the wind.

Changes:

Switched it to two clauses with a semicolon to infer that the second clause is why the ocean looked like a crop field, also lends itself to a more active verb (reflected rather than refracting).
Swapped out refracted for reflected, because the many small water droplets are actually reflecting light—they do some refracting, but that's not what causes the appearance of white on white-caps.
Changed the verb for the wheat to waving, a verb that (cleverly, if I do say so) directly associates with white-caps and ocean and the noun waves that appear earlier in the paragraph. Also, waving is a visual verb, whereas rustling is a sonic verb, and I'm describing the visual here. Lastly, the phrase "wheat spikes waving in the wind" adds that last little extra bit of alliterative juiciness to make this sentence a phonetic delight.\

I made these edits on my final-final read-through of my book, after already proofreading it twice. These are the kinds of things that (I hope) will make the book stand out even though few readers will consciously register them.

May 21 I'm building my personal site and had a cool idea to have randomized placeholder email populate my subscription box on page-load, with fun emails of deceased writers/thinkers. I brief Claude in plan-mode, and it built the whole functionality perfectly within a couple minutes.

All I have to do, which I'm going to start now, is to populate the array const PLACEHOLDER_EMAILS with some nerdy names and domains. How fun!

Female authors like Joan Didion and Annie Dillard have been incredibly influential to me, but I don't want to include anyone who is still alive or who lived in the era of email. But there are several of my favorite female characters that I wanted to highlight. As I kept writing this list, it got sillier and the references less serious, more pop. I like it, and I'm sure it will keep growing.

Now, when people revisit my site or a blog post, they will see a different placeholder email, it will bring them a little hit of delight. Even if they don't notice the emails changing, even seeing one of these will hopefully bring a smile to their face.

In this "final edit" (let's hope!) of my book, I just rewrote the final paragraph again. It's better than ever. Here's v1, v2, and v3 in that order (spoiler alert for Beneath the Glacier):

Once I had let go of it all—my rock-balance, the stillness, the freedom, Iceland, this whole adventure—something else came up to meet me. Heading back to the campground, I passed the Sun Voyager again, and I stopped once more to revel in the view. The sun had dipped even lower, the orange mist now dimmer and more diffuse. It was late enough in the season that dusk precedes true darkness, and stars would be visible. Though, there was still enough light for me to see a thin landmass backlit on the horizon; it jutted out from behind the nearest mountain across the bay and stopped before it stabbed the Harpa’s now distant silhouette. That landmass was the western tip of the Snæfellsness Peninsula. For it to be visible from Reykjavík meant that there was not a single cloud between me and Snæfellsjökull, which stood seventy-two miles away. I squinted toward the horizon and saw that the glacier was where it ought to be: above me and within me.

Heading back to the campground, I passed the Sun Voyager again and stopped once more to revel in the view. The orange mist was now dim and diffuse. Soon, stars would be visible, yet there was still enough light for me to see a thin and distant backlit landmass; it jutted out from behind the nearest mountain across the bay and stopped before puncturing the Harpa’s now distant silhouette. That landmass was the western tip of Snæfellsnes. For it to be visible from Reykjavík meant there was not a single cloud between me and Snæfellsjökull. I squinted toward the horizon and saw that the glacier was where it ought to be: above me and within me.

Heading back to the campground, I passed the Sun Voyager once more and stopped to revel in the view. The orange mist was now dim and diffuse. Soon, stars would be visible, yet there was still enough light for me to see a thin landmass on the horizon. The western tip of Snæfellsnes jutted out from behind the nearest mountain, across the bay, and halted before piercing the Harpa’s now distant silhouette. For the peninsula to be visible from Reykjavík, there must not have been a single cloud for seventy miles to obscure Snæfellsjökull. I squinted toward the horizon and saw that the glacier was where it ought to be: above me and within me.

The main meaning, content, and the final line are all the same throughout these versions, but the paragraph got more compressed, more apt verbs, more intricate call-backs and symbolism, better rhythm. This final version feels just right.

Lastly, this latest edit was spurred on by the repetition of "distant" in the penultimate draft. I hated that and knew I'd have to rework the thing to fix it. Funny enough, the final draft doesn't use "distant" once but relies on "for seventy miles" and "on the horizon" imply it, describe it.

May 22 Sin is not man's propensity to miss but our ability to aim.

// Do not consider sin as man's propensity to miss but as our ability to aim.

// Consider sin not as the propensity to miss but as the ability to aim.

The Land Before Time (dinosaur film and TV show) is a more accurate delimiter of generations than the year 2000. The last of the millennials know and love the film (1998); the first of Gen Z have only ever seen the TV show (2007) or have no memory of the franchise whatsoever. I'm among the youngest millennials.

A Modern Copyright Clause

Welcome to yet another day of book-making minutia! My copyright page is 125 words, and I've probably spent 3–5 hours on it, researching, rewriting, etc. The latest curfuffle had to do with the main paragraph of the page, the "All rights reserved" bit.

Here are the five latest versions in order of oldest to most recent (hopefully final), which I began revising with the intention to include a clause about AI—version-to-version changes are bolded:

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, except for brief quotations, without written permission from the author.

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All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations with proper attribution, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means or for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems, without prior written permission from the author.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations with proper attribution, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means for any purpose, including training artificial intelligence technologies or systems, without prior written permission from the author.

Notes on Silo Season 2 At the end of Season 1, I was worried that the scope would creep out to being too big, like the mistake Westworld made after its first season, but that didn't happen. Silo Season 2 is another banger. It's quintessential, platonic allegorical sci-fi. I absolutely love it.

The only time I wasn't completely engrossed was when and how the show first introduced the other people besides Solo and Jules in Silo 17. I get why it was important to have that reveal and then explain it via flashbacks, but the dynamic between Solo and Jules was so captivating that I didn't need anything else. I didn't need any question or tension besides whether Solo was going to be able to remain stable enough to help her and then, ultimately, to let her leave. I think they could have stuck with just the two of them for the duration, and it wouldn't have changed the plot much at all. It is nice to know that Solo has company now, but he didn't really need anyone besides Juliette to experience his character growth.

All that to say, the character- and plot-writing is exceptionally good, and in a show like this, that's essential, because the setting rarely offers new visuals or information to hold onto. Yet those reveals are also well-timed, and somehow, it feels like our characters' world keeps getting bigger even though it is a limited, confined bunker of a world. Again, upon the final scene of this season, I am concerned about scope-creep. Of course, I want to know the answers to the big questions and solve the mystery, but I want to learn as the main characters learn. (I don't really give a shit about the GA congressman and his date. That whole scene was jarring and not necessary to create a cliff-hanger effect between seasons.) Hopefully Season 3 is very sparing with the pre-Silo, extra-Silo scenes and characters. I want to be right there underground, in the concrete, with our main crew as they struggle through. I watched (and loved) Severance; I'm patient. While I want the answers, I'm in no rush to get them all. Some questions can also be left unanswered. I hope these writers agree.

Honestly, I really don't care how the Silo came to be. I would much rather not know the "why" until Juliette learns it. I can assume nuclear war, and that's a good enough working theory for me.

Season 3 isn't out yet, but I think it comes out soon (a pleasant coincidence). In the meantime, I'm definitely going to read Hugh Howey's "Wool," the original short story that crated this world.

My three favorite characters behind Juliette and Walker are Patrick Kennedy, Dr. Nichols, and Solo—all so well written, so relatable, so easy to root for, and also troubled and conflicted enough to be fleshed out and real, unlike typical heroes.

May 23 A surprising usage error on Yamuzaru's menu that I didn't notice until my fifth time here:

Spicy Edamame $4.75: Boiled soybeans with chilly peppers.

. . . unless that's their way of saying that the peppers aren't all that hot.

May 25 Notes on Batman: Mask of the Phantasm

I can't believe I never watched this as a kid. It's perfect, unbeatable. With Kevin Conroy's Batman and Mark Hamill's Joker, you can never really go wrong, but somehow the animation is also the best it could possibly be, along with the writing and characters.

The character of Andrea Beaumont and her entire love story with Bruce was created for this movie, as well as the villain the Phantasm. She is the star of the show in a lot of ways. The writing in the flashbacks and how she attracts Bruce and how he falls for her is believable and engrossing and tragic when it doesn't work out. With just the one engagement scene, the writers recreated Batman's origin, suggesting that the bat-swarm omen came too late, after he had already chosen a path of happiness rather than vengeance, but then crime took split him and Andrea apart.

Somehow, they also work the Joker in there seamlessly without him feeling either over-dominant or crowded out. Phantasm remains the main villain throughout, but the Joker accelerated the plot and the tension right in time for a big and brilliant climax at the abandoned site of the Gotham World's Fair (which was the site of one of Andrea and Bruce's first dates).

Anything that wasn't super believable was in great service to the plot and so cool that I was happy to suspend my disbelief: e.g., Phantasm's teleportation (?) ability and Joker's Bat-seeking drones (how?).

What a pleasure and a delight to watch this on a Monday morning of Memorial Day weekend—felt like being a kid again, but now I have the taste and vocabulary to express why this is a masterpiece for all ages: 10/10.

I think I just left my first YouTube comment ever, on a ten-year-old game clip of a combat challenge level from Batman: Arkham Knight. The gameplay is pretty killer, and the video has 279 views and no comments (until now):

This is awesome, man. I just picked up Arkham Knight again today and got 9 Rival Points on this challenge—wanted to find someone who’s better than me before I got too cocky. I’ll try Nightmare difficulty next. Hope you’ve been enjoying life for the last 10 years!

I read so many YouTube comment sections and find great delight in them. Maybe I should contribute more often.

May 26 "No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader" has the corollary: No mystery for the writer, no mystery for the reader. When structure becomes too templated and a planner refuses to "pants" a single part, you risk stripping some of the spirit of a book. If I, as the writer, have no questions in my head, I have no motivation to write, which leaves the writing uninspired—just as the reader will stop reading if she has no questions that she wants the subsequent pages to answer.

Gustave Doré (WikiArt), prolific French engraver/illustrator, is one of my favorite artists. I was first introduced to his work in eight grade by a large-format edition of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner featuring 42 engravings (from this set) rendered as full-bleed illustrations from Doré. There are a few panels in that book that I would love to own as metal-engraved replicas, including:

Just caught a wonderfully wise quote from a Jimmy Carr clip on YouTube:

Happiness is your current situation minus expectations. That's it! Cheer up. You're in San Diego. You made it. You're doing great.

How Ocean Tides Work

I've always struggled to understand the tides, but I think just thought of a one-sentence phrase that puts it cleanly into my own words.

Daylight in a place depends on whether that spot on earth is facing the sun; high tide in a place depends on whether that spot on earth is facing the moon.

Tide charts and daylight graphs look similar for this exact reason, but tide charts are less obvious, because they are uncorrelated with the earth's position relative to the sun. The moon's gravity creates a tidal bulge that, it can be imagined, every spot on the earth rotates through. When the moon is at the zenith, it is high tide. When the moon is at the zenith on the opposite side of the earth, it is low tide.

Okay, after doing some research, my "simple, memorable explanation" is almost entirely wrong. First, there are two total bulges on Earth (duh), and any one place experiences two high and low tides per day. Those are facts, but it turns out that everything about tides is subtle. It's why Fluid Dynamics is a grad-level course and not a unit in AP Physics; fluids are more complex than electricity and magnetism. Tides are more complex than daylight.

With the help of this video from PBS Space Time, I can confidently say that the simplest explanation is still complex and requires many assumptions and negligences.

There are two tidal bulges on earth in line with the moon, because every particle on the Earth's surface, including water, has a tidal (lunar) gravitation affect on it at all times, and those gravity-force vectors point tangentially away from a vertical center-line drawn through the Earth perpendicular to the Earth-moon line. So, all of that material pushes together, all falling toward the moon, but objects on one side of the earth fall slower toward the moon than on the near side, which accounts for the second bulge. Those two points on the Earth's surface, relative to one another, are getting pushed apart.

Then, of course, you have to account for the Sun's tidal effect (1/3rd that of the moon's, not negligible), accounting for spring and neap tides. And you have to account for the continents and their shapes. Tides behave differently across the various books and crannies in land. Some places have massive tidal ranges (up to 10 meters per day) because they happen to be a "choke point" where many tidal collisions converge, causing water to funnel into and out of a small area.

The tides are a chain-reaction, a cacophony of collisions all trending in two directions. Everything experiences a tidal force, and all liquids change in tide as the earth spins through the bulges, but those tides are microscopic; oceans (the ocean) are the only water body massive enough to have enough collisions in that chain-reaction to produce any noticeable affects.

Notes on The Death of Superman

I recently procured a handful of DC animated Blu-Rays, and I probably shouldn't have watched Mask of the Phantasm first. It's just impossible to beat. Unfortunately, this movie didn't even compare.

The plot is lacking. The entire film is about whether Clark will reveal his true identity to Lois (which we know he will). Not only do we know the outcome in advance but his decision and timing to tell Lois doesn't impact the story nor serve any character at all. Their fateful lunch is used as a plot device to explain why Superman takes so long to arrive at the site of the Doomsday fight. But even with that allowance, he still takes to long from suiting up to coming to Wonder Woman's aid. Doomsday was already in the outskirts of Metropolis, and Wonder Woman was getting beat to a pulp for minutes while, I am forced to imagine, Superman was hailing a taxi to the suburbs.

The entire plot of this movie is the Doomsday fight. Everything else is self-referential or references to other plot points in the DC Universe. As evidence, there are FOUR end-credit scenes, all cryptic and 5-seconds each. Yikes! Each of those expands on one od the many open loops from this movie and suggests where they might lead, like how the Apokolips–Earth alloy (and, therefore, the whole opening battle sequence) doesn't come into play at all except to lead Superman to investigate Lex Corp, which is fruitless anyway.

I mean, wow, the plot of this movie is thin and unsatisfying, especially now that I think about it. The action is great, and the character designs, and the art style. But that's all there is here: spectacle. Somehow, Mask of the Phantasm's animation is better than what's here, even though it was created 25 years earlier (1993 and 2018). Like I said, the art style is really nice to look at (except for the odd and distracting eyebrows on everyone), and these animations have more polygons and richer colors than Phantasm, but there is less dynamism, personality,

The writing is at fault for the weak plot, and there weren't any stand-out scenes or dialogue for me except for notable blunders and bores. The only time the Justice League is all together at once, they are having a meeting to discuss the next quarter's budget—literally the only issue raised in the meeting is the fact that the previous month's utility bill exceeded the U.N.'s funding. (Again, yikes!) I think it was supposed to be funny, but then there was this kicker from Cyborg: "We'll meet again soon. Same bat-time, same bat-channel," which freaking sent me right out of Suspension of Disbelief Land and right into "Oh, this is a dumb superhero movie. I thought this was for adults." Because of course that line makes so sense in this universe. Are you telling me there is a Batman cartoon? I guess there is Wonder Woman merch (which she boasted about during the budgeting meeting), so maybe there's a Batman show inside a Batman show . . . ?

Also, possibly my favorite non-Batman Justice League member, Martian Manhunter, is criminally underserved here. His design is cool (again, the only thing this movie has going for it, along with the action in the fight scenes), but he has probably three total lines and is wiped out by Doomsday—blown up by a gas station—within seconds of exiting his state of invulnerability. They just used his mind-reading powers as an expositional device to reveal that Doomsday has no thoughts and is just a rage-filled killing machine.

Uh oh, I got started on the exposition. Holy shit are there some unearned expository moments, the worst being Lex Luthor monologue to his team of scientists about their exact goal and mission of detecting the arrival of h the next super-powered alien and preventing it, as if they are not working toward that mission all day every day.

If someone asked me about this movie, I would encourage them to watch clips of the main battle or find high-res stills of the character design. I know these events are also relevant to the DC universe at large, so maybe that's a reason to watch it for some people. But I cannot recommend this movie as a narrative-driven experience: 5/10.

May 28 I'm revisiting my highlights from Milan Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being, and this quote is apt and amazing. Now that I have the paperback copy, I see that part of this paragraph is what's quoted on the back cover of Harper Perennial's edition, but it's even more impactful in context:

[Tereza's] dreams were eloquent, but they were also beautiful. That aspect seems to have escaped Freud in his theory of dreams. Dreaming is not merely an act of communication (or coded communication, if you like); it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself. Our dreams prove that to imagine—to dream about things that have not happened—is among mankind's deepest needs. Herein lies the danger. If dreams were not beautiful, they would quickly be forgotten. But Tereza kept coming back to her dreams, running through them in here mind, turning them into legends. Tomas lived under the hypnotic spell cast by the excruciating beauty of Tereza's dreams.

Not only does this frame dreams as an inherently good and necessary human experience (especially remembering them and seeing them as beautiful) but it also expresses a beautiful duality of the masculine and feminine, where Tereza and Tomas meet in the territory of unbearable lightness: Tomas's unrelenting pursuit of freedom from obligation and Tereza's near-magic connection with the "unreal" (where the truth is).

Also, there is this beautiful paragraph only a few paragraphs later, which perfectly encapsulates the feeling/sensation/response that is the call of the void:

Anyone whose goal is something higher must expect some day to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? Then why do we feel it even when the observation tower comes equipped with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, we defend ourselves.

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