Fearless Survivors

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Most of the time, though, that sense of frontier won out over grief. There was simply too much to know and do. Tiche downloaded volumes on volumes on off-the-grid methodologies, everything from herbal pharmacology to stick fighting for self-defense. One day she asked Paolo in still broken Italian, if they’d become crazy libertarians by accident.

He thought for a moment and said, “A man of the right means a man who is afraid and nothing else. We are not afraid.”

The Soma Earth, by Ciro Faienza; published in Solar Punk: Short Stories from Many Futures, edited by Francesco Verso.

General Strike

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To be clear, I made the decision to add the social media portion of this strike just for myself – it’s not an official general strike request.

Resources:

Indivisible
ThePeoplesSickDay.com
What to know about National Shutdown on Jan. 30 in Wisconsin
The General Strike
https://www.advocate.com/politics/general-strike-nationwide-anti-ice#rebelltitem1

Women as a Competitive Menace

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The problem of female labor as a “competitive menace” came to Milwaukee in the spring of 1852. At that time, Madame Mathilde Franziska Anneke founded the first woman suffrage paper of the state, Die Frauen Zeitung. Madam Anneke had been offered the use of Moritz Schoeffler’s printshop where the first German daily of the state, the Wisconsin Banner, was published. However, the printers at Schoeffler’s establishment refused to set the type, perhaps because of their opposition to a woman-suffrage paper, but more likely because of Madame Anneke’s advocacy of female compositors.

Early Unions in Milwaukee 1840-1884, by Thomas W. Gavett, Workers and Unions in Wisconsin, A Labor History Anthology, edited by Darryl Holter

Worthy Empire

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Some of our friends in college thought of Jianwen as a Chinese nationalist, but that’s not quite right. She dislikes all empires because to her, they are the ultimate institutions, with deadly concentration of power. She doesn’t think the American empire is any more worthy of support that the Russian one or the Chinese one. As she put it “America is only a democracy for those lucky enough to be Americans. To everybody else, it’s just a dictator with the biggest bombs and missiles.”

She wants the perfection of disintermediated chaos rather than the imperfect stability of flawed institutions that could be perfected.

Byzantine Empathy, by Ken Liu; published in Solar Punk: Short Stories from Many Futures, edited by Francesco Verso.

First Unionized Strike in Milwaukee

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The first successful strike in Milwaukee was called in September, 1848, by a Ship Carpenters and Caulkers Association at the shipbuilding company of George Barber. The skilled workers demanded improvements in hours and wages, and a restriction on the number of unskilled workers — “barndoor joiners” as the strikers dubbed them — employed…When the agreement was broken, the union members, for the first time in Milwaukee, decided to start a cooperative store and warehouse with $1,200.

Early Unions in Milwaukee 1840-1884, by Thomas W. Gavett, Workers and Unions in Wisconsin, A Labor History Anthology, edited by Darryl Holter

Despicable Elitism

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Jianwen despised elitism in all its forms — she was keenly aware of the irony of this, coming from an Ivy-educated financial services technologist with a roomful of top-end VR gear like her. It was one group of elites who decided that democracy wasn’t “right” for her country, and another group of elites who decided that they knew best who deserved sympathy and who didn’t. The elites distrusted feelings, distrusted what made people human.

Byzantine Empathy, by Ken Liu; published in Solar Punk: Short Stories from Many Futures, edited by Francesco Verso.

Virtual Empathy

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Tan Jianwen ripped off her headset, gasping. Her hands shook as she unzipped her immersion suit, and she managed to peel it halfway off before her hands lost their strengths. As she curled up on the omnidirectional treadmill, the bruises on her sweat-drenched body glistened dark red in the faint white glow of her computer screen, the only light on in the dark studio apartment. She dry-heaved a few times before breaking into sobs.

Though her eyes were closed, she could still see the grim expressions on the faces of the soldiers, the bloody pulp that had been the mother’s head, the broken little body of the baby, her life trampled out of her.

She had disabled the safety features of the immersion suit and removed the amplitude filters in the algics circuitry. It didn’t seem right to experience the ordeal of the Muertien refugees with pain filters in place.

A VR rig was the ultimate empathy machine. How could she truly say she had walked in their shoes without suffering as they did?

Byzantine Empathy, by Ken Liu; published in Solar Punk: Short Stories from Many Futures, edited by Francesco Verso.

Cat in a Box

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Christmas just wouldn’t be Christmas without a visit from the cat in a box! 😀😄🤣😂

Happy Holidays 2025

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Summer in Wisconsin

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I’ve posted two ASMR videos to my YouTube channel. Both are created from video footage of afternoon hikes taken during my 2025 summer vacation.

Wisconsin Dells
This video was taken on a State Park trail in the Wisconsin Dells. I’ve replaced the sound of the hike with dogs barking in the distance and general forest sounds because the only noise my phone picked up during the hike was my own breathing – and that really sounded odd.

Willow River State Park, Wisconsin
The footage from Willow River State Park is unedited. The sounds were all recorded by my phone as I hiked the trail. The wind through the trees is a pretty steady background noise, except where the water running under a bridge takes over. There’s a fun encounter with a toad and a spot where I captured butterflies and bees landing on flowers.

No artificial intelligence (AI) or fancy editing, just videos of an afternoon spent in the outdoors (literally touching grass) during my summer vacation.