Peter Hunt Welch's Blog

Stop Talking to Technology Executives Like They Have Anything to Say

I do not enjoy writing about technology. Aside from the shiny, birdlike emotion I get from opening a new Apple product every three years, I do not enjoy using much of modern technology. I view my phone with mistrust and resentment, even as I allow it to eat my time with distractions to recover from ...

W.E.L.P.

Congratulations! You've made it to the collapse of the postwar order. The future is not going to be great. The United States might have made a mistake in building a military-backed economic empire before contending with its original sins. The president-elect is likely going to pardon the collected ...

Navigating the Anxiety Vortex

Upon the most recent medical assurance that I had more than a few months to live, I was more relieved than I expected to be. Having no obvious death wish, I found myself struggling to describe why I was so unburdened and why I didn't notice what I was carrying around in the first place. Thus was born ...

In Praise of Excruciation

Making a metal bull model almost killed me. It is a known element of ADHD fixation that the sufferer tends to Do The Next Thing without regard for the context, so it was a full minute before I realized the hand trying to force a screw two more millimeters through an unyielding socket was the same ...

Tech Erosion

While flying back into the states from a sorely needed yet thoroughly exhausting vacation, the final hurdle between air travel tortures and public transit was customs. Going through US customs as a US citizen always irks me. In European countries, going through customs as a US citizen is, for me, ...

Eldritch Gymnastics

Smile scared the piss out of me. In my middle age, with all its years of nothing inexplicable ever happening to me or anyone I know, I'm not easily scared by monsters. Alien and The Thing are both in my top ten favorite movies. My eyes go through multiple full rotations when my wife listens to "real" ...

AI Is Not the Problem

There's a rule for watching Star Trek episodes: Pay attention to three-word noun phrases in the jargon. Reversed polarity? Shut up, Wesley, it won't work. Main deflector dish? Plot point. Inverse tachyon pulse? Say hello to my little paradox. This is also how real jargon bubbles up to pseudo-relevance ...

To the Tiny Spider That Came With Us From Brooklyn

It was the briefest slice of light, a telltale shimmer, that revealed you. It glinted up your thread, running down from the ceiling to the lamp sitting incongruous in the middle of an unpacked living room. Did you stow away in that lamp, riding rough in the back of the moving van, those three long ...

Pennsylvania, So Far

Brooklyn tried to kill us before we left. I half-woke in an already disgusting apartment at two in morning from dreams of a waterfall to an actual waterfall in our bathroom. A main had broken on the third floor, so every other bathroom in the building was doing the same thing. We salvaged what we ...

Dysmantle is a Revelation and the One-Armed King is my God

I spent two days in my basement growing crops. I needed the crops, of course, to satisfy The Ark. The Ark would preserve a bit of humanity's culture for a future that may or may not exist. It also contains a weapon that it will give me once I finish feeding it crops and fish and wood and rubber ...