🧙🏼♂️ MTG Mural Time-Lapse, Live Zelda Medley, Book Club Announcements, Link Dump, & More!
Some fun rabbit holes. As usual, more than I should share but less than I'd like to!
Happy New Year! You’re probably reading this on January 8th, in which case today is my 40th birthday. For however long you’ve been reading this blog since I began it in 2009, thank you for your attention and I hope you feel like you’re getting your worth!
Starting 2024 off on a happy note, I just finished my first mural in years — an iconic romp through the history of Magic: The Gathering for Twilight Hobbies & Games in Santa Fe. I had A LOT of fun working on this and highly recommend you visit the store in person to check it and them out on your next pass through town:
Or watch it without the heavy-handed (albeit profound) voiceover on Instagram.
Also, here’s new live trio footage (!) of my song about trying to complete every shrine in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild and other forms of compulsive behavior:
There’s one more song from this set yet to share but I will do that soon…
(New Mexicans: I’m playing again soon with that amazing drummer, Tommy Baumann on January 20th — back at the Santa Fe Brewing Company for the Monsoon Music House 2024 Songwriter Contest!)
🫂 Upcoming Book Clubs: Iron John & The Lost World
Next up for the Future Fossils book club is Robert Bly’s legendary book “about men,” a voyage through mythology and masculinity, the crisis of the modern male, and how to find one’s self as both wild and responsible. One of the constant themes in Future Fossils is how to restore the vital roles of elders and initiation, and what we must reclaim from ancient lifeways in this process. I’ve been through a crazy several years and likely you have, too…and when I posted my reflections on this book’s first couple chapters, it resulted in such rich discussion that I knew I had to focus everyone’s enthusiasm for the subject in a safer space.
I will send out a scheduling poll to paying Patreon and Substack members soon. Please join us for what promises to be the deepest inquiry we’ve had to date — a chance to be raw, vulnerable, vivid, and reflective with some folks who have already done a lot of work on their mythopoetic selves!
(Everyone’s invited to participate regardless of your gender identity. But unlike the Future Fossils Facebook group — and more like our Discord server — this will be a space for mutual support instead of philosophical challenge…)
Next up (sometime after Valentine’s Day): we’ll take an expedition into the dark heart of Michael Crichton’s ONLY sequel, The Lost World! We’re long overdue for a return to my ongoing group research on how the Jurassic Park franchise acts as a magnifying lens for philosophical investigations into chaos and complexity, economics and other forms of animal behavior, and the co-evolution of technology and science.
Anyone who was part of our Jurassic Park book club, or the Jurassic Worlding course I taught last summer, can attest to just how rich a seam of big ideas these books and movies are once you get past the dino-sizzle.
Grab your copies of Iron John and The Lost World in my Bookshop.org store and you not only support family bookstores, but I get a slice of the proceeds!
🔗 Link Dump from Cynefin Retreat 2023: Anthro-Complexity & Human Systems with Dave Snowden and Alicia Juarerro
On the other end of the spectrum, I recently participated in a magical three-day retreat in D.C. on how to navigate the non-computable complexity of human systems. As one of three invited “Eagles” (experts) I helped thirty-or-so smart professionals reframe their work in education, governance, health, leadership consulting, and myriad other disciplines.
Based on Dave Snowden’s sensemaking procedures and facilitated by his awesome daughter Eleanor, we fostered lively inquiry into what can be done with models, where they fail, and how to “feel our way across the river stone by stone” together when they do.
The talks and conversations were electric and I hope that their recordings will be made available soon — but in either case, I dropped so many references that others asked me nicely to create a “link bouquet” so folks could follow up on all the rabbit holes I mapped in conversation. Here that is!
✨ Republished: My 2009 Feature on Psychedelic Philosophy & Transhumanism
“The farther forward you want to think, the further back you have to go.”
– R. Buckminster Fuller
Lastly, a blast from the past! Once upon a time, notable cyborg trickster and editorial genius R.U. Sirius commissioned me to forge a conversation between five great minds of psychedelic philosophy on the subterranean links between tripping and transhumanism. In what proved to be a prophetic pre-echo of this decade’s rampant A.I.-resurrected philosophy podcast roundtables, I transcribed and then remixed rants from Tim Leary, Terence McKenna, Erik Davis, Mark Pesce, and David Pearce for a mind-altering riff-fest on information theory, individuality, mind, cyborg theory, and the transcendence (or is it?) of death.
(If you can believe it, this piece actually made it onto the cover of a physical magazine for sale on the Barnes & Noble news stand…!)
Dig in here and give it some claps.
🍄 Joining The Advisory Board of Noonautics
“The exploration of the external world by the methods of physical science leads not to a concrete reality but to a shadow world of symbols, beneath which those methods are unadapted for penetrating.”
– Arthur Eddington
In other news, I’m now on the advisory board for Noonautics.org, a radical new non-profit created to facilitate extended-state DMT research and potentially-revolutionary satellite-based archaeology! The board is quite a motley crew, featuring legendary psychedelic researchers like Andrew Gallimore and Dennis McKenna alongside maverick provocateurs like Graham Hancock. It’s a very early-stage project and things are just shaping up, but you can expect to hear more news soon.
In the meantime, may I recommend Gallimore’s heady Substack article, “The Case for DMT Entities”? It just might help you cross the inferential gap and grok why I think being on this team is so important…
~ ~ ~
…and that’s enough for now, folks. Thanks again for reading!
I hope you’re well! Don’t hesitate to write.
👀 Upcoming episodes of Future Fossils:
• Paleontologist Jingmai O’Connor of The Field Museum on Studying Dead Birds
• Social Scientist Nicholas Brigham Adams of Goodly Labs on Collective Sensemaking
• Psychonauts David Jay Brown & Sara Phinn Huntley on Cataloguing DMT Entities
• NXT Museum Panel on The Creative Mis-Use of Technology
• Gregory Landua & Speaker John Ash on Regenerative Autonomous Ecosystems
• & More!