I liked the book's ideas about tribes in a post-nation state world. I loved its story of a young girl's journey into adulthood while being guided by people near and far.

and

"I know that you have a secret, Nell, though I cannot imagine what it is, and I know that your secret has made you different from any other girl I have ever taught... [W]e must dispense with what makes you like all the other girls and concentrate on what makes you different."

What’s the most essential item of rain gear that you wear or use or carry around this time of year?

The manifesto has an inherent tension between growing communities with shared values and avoiding one-size-fits-all solutions. If the community grows large enough, its software becomes that globally dominant solution.

Its notion of communities cultivating shared values reminded me of the IAF-affiliated Silicon Valley Allied for the Common Good and their efforts to find common ground to solve ad hoc social problems.

I don’t know anything about the group of authors, but the manifesto mentions Christopher Alexander, an architect and computer system design theorist whose work inspired “SimCity”, the first (and most “resonant”) desktop computer game I’ve every played. So that’s a big plus in my eyes.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0B8...

I can name 8 for sure and for 2 more I have a guess.

The sadism in Book Two was tough to read, and I felt buried under a mountain of technical terms whose definitions kept changing. But once I realized that some characters in the book struggled with that, too, I just went with the flow and enjoyed the story. I recommend it!

Another plus: a YKarma-like currency, which I made one trivial pull request to: github.com/rezendi/ykar...

Nominally a sci-fi novel, Exadelic morphed into a tale of demons, daemons, sadism, romance, and cyberpunk futures. Some tech sounded familiar (like Google-ish mega-corporations) and sadly familiar (like "propaganda warfare"). In the end, it asked the question, what does it mean to be human?

Congratulations! After educating and challenging and enlightening the minds of so many people throughout your career, you've earned a little (a lot!) of "me time." May this change open up your schedule and mind and heart to many new, rewarding connections.

What’s not clear to me is, are we headed toward a King, or are we headed toward a Mob?

However, when I’m not being a people pleaser, say, when I want to win an argument, I can go too far. In both cases, the first gate (“Is it true?”) should keep me from harming myself and others.

California has the heft to do good, to do more than virtue posture. It has the ability to help keep the House a bit more representative.

“States strong enough to do good are but few. Their number would seem limited to three.” In 1947, when Robert Frost wrote this, he was referring to post-WWII nation states. But it’s a pretty apt description of present day US states.

I liked this poem because it reminded me how at times I can be a people pleaser without even being aware of it.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...