Rick Wayne's Blog

Death by Absurdity

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Life in the future isn’t just strange, it’s lethally absurd.1

Death by Axe Body Spray.Many teenage boys suffer from excessive use of deodorant sprays. Unfortunately, for Jonathan Capewell, personal hygiene was a tragic obsession. His persistent use built toxic levels of butane and propane in his system, triggering a heart attack in 1998. He was 16.Death by Sorcery.A year later, all 11 members of the Bena Tshadi football club died on the field after a series of lightning strikes in Eastern Kasai, Democratic Republic of the Congo, where use of sorcery and talismans against sporting opponents is common. The other team left the field unharmed.Death by Time Zone.Four Palestinian terrorists, apparently protesting a newly-signed Israeli-Palestinian agreement, attempted the simultaneous detonation of multiple car bombs at 6 pm Israeli time, but due to a change in Israel’s time zone, they were an hour behind schedule, and all were killed when their bombs detonated en route.Death by Cannibal.In 2001, Bernd Brandes, a German engineer from Berlin, responded to an internet advertisement placed by cannibal Armin Meiwes, who was looking for something to eat. On March 9th, the pair met and Brandes was willingly slaughtered so that he could be butchered and eaten by Meiwes, who became a vegetarian in prison.Death by Bestiality I.In 2005, near Enumclaw, Washington, a Boeing engineer named Kenneth Pinyan died of a ruptured colon after receiving anal sex from a stallion. Pinyan and two accomplices had been filming their escapades with animals and posting them online.Death by Bestiality II.In 2008, A 43-year-old Irish mother of four died of an allergic reaction after having sex with a German Shepherd. The animal’s owner, Sean McDonnell, met the woman in a bestiality chat room.Death by Irony I.Jimi Heselden, then-owner of Segway Inc., died in 2010 after accidentally riding his Segway Personal Transport System off a cliff in Thorp Arch, England.Death by Cockroach.In 2012, 32-year-old Edward Archbold of West Palm Beach, Florida, choked to death while participating in a cockroach eating contest.Death by iPhone I.In 2013, Roger Mirro was crushed by a trash compactor while digging through a dumpster for his phone.Death by Doughnut.Hayato Tsuruta, a 28 year-old with severe mental disabilities and a killer sweet tooth, ran away from his care facility to a nearby supermarket, where he consumed so many doughnuts that he died.Death by Meteor.In 2016, a 40-year-old Indian bus driver named V. Kamaraj was struck out of the blue by a meteorite and killed. Although the cause of death was contested by NASA, analysis of the body showed the presence of carbonaceous chondrites, a meteoric material.Death by WTF I.That same year, 89-year-old Robert Dreyer crashed his car into a fire hydrant and was swallowed by the hidden sinkhole underneath.Death by Irony II.In 2017, the aptly named Rebecca Burger, a 33-year-old fitness blogger and model, died after a pressurized canister of whipped cream exploded and struck her in the chest, causing cardiac arrest.Death by Delay I.In 2018, 29-year-old Sam Ballard died from angiostrongyliasis, a roundworm infection he contracted after eating a garden slug on a dare eight years earlier.Death by Social Media I.In January 2019, a Sri Lankan man was trampled to death while filming himself attempting to hypnotize an elephant.Death by Social Media II.In order to record a gender reveal worthy of posting online, members of the Kreimeyer family of Marion County, Iowa, filled a steel umbrella stand with gunpowder, but instead of emitting a shower of sparks as intended, the device acted as a pipe bomb, killing 56-year-old Pamela Kreimeyer, who was struck in the head by debris.Death by Social Media III.Tetsu Shiohara, a hiker from Tokyo, attempted to livestream an off-season ascent of Mount Fuji only to fall to his death meters from the summit. Shortly before the fatal accident, he told his audience that ‘this part is dangerous’ but that it ‘can’t be helped, though’. He then lost his footing and slid down a 30-degree incline and over the side of the mountain. Shiohara’s camera captured the fall.Death by Narrative Warfare I.On August 10th, 2019, the body of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was found in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York, NY. The day before his death, Epstein’s cellmate was transferred out, but no one took his place. The evening of Epstein’s death, the two cameras in front of his cell began malfunctioning. Epstein was also supposed to be checked every 30 minutes, but the two guards assigned to his unit fell asleep and did not check on him for three hours. They admitted later to falsifying records and received probation. His death was ruled a suicide.Death by Delay II.Also in 2019, the decomposed body of 25-year-old Larry Ely Murillo-Moncada, a supermarket employee from Council Bluffs, Iowa, was discovered behind a cooler, where he had become trapped ten years earlier, in 2009.Death by WTF II.On January 14th, 2020, 69-year-old Sergio Millán was alone in his apartment in Torreforta, Spain, when an explosion in a petrochemical plant three kilometers away launched a one-ton iron plate into the sky. The plate landed in the apartment above him, causing the ceiling to collapse, killing him.Death by Lockdown.A 54-year-old man from Massachusetts died in 2020 after eating a bag and a half of black licorice every day for a few weeks. Licorice contains glycyrrhizinic acid, which along with its metabolite glycyrrhetinic acid mimics the hormone aldosterone, which regulates potassium levels. Excessive consumption resulted in over-excretion of potassium and cardiac arrest. A paper titled “Licorice abuse: time to send a warning message” appeared in a 2012 issue of the journal Therapeutic Advances in Endocrinology and Metabolism.Death by WTF III.On August 4th, 2020, a large amount of ammonium nitrate stored at the port of Beirut exploded, causing at least 207 deaths and 7,500 injuries and leaving an estimated 300,000 people homeless. A cargo of 2,750 tons, equivalent to 1.1 kilotons of TNT, had been confiscated from an abandoned ship and stored in a warehouse without proper safety measures for six years. The explosion was preceded by a fire, but the exact cause of the detonation is still under investigation.Death by iPhone II.In May 2021, the decomposing body of a 39-year-old man was found wedged inside a papier-mâché statue of a stegosaurus in the town of Santa Coloma de Gramenet, Spain. A police representative theorized that the man crawled head-first into the statue to retrieve a lost mobile phone before his leg became stuck, trapping him.Death by Narrative Warfare II.On June 23rd, 2021, British-American computer programmer, entrepreneur, and political activist John McAfee was found dead in a prison cell near Barcelona shortly after his extradition to the United States on tax evasion charges was authorized by the Spanish National Court. Nine years earlier, in 2012, McAfee’s property in Belize was raided by the national police, who arrested McAfee on suspicion of drug manufacturing and possession of an unlicensed weapon. He was released without charge. In November of that year, Belize police sought McAfee as a “person of interest” in connection with the murder of his neighbor, American expatriate Gregory Faull, who was found dead of a gunshot wound at his home on Ambergris Caye. After fleeing the country, McAfee told Wired magazine that he has always been afraid police would kill him. On November 30th, 2019, he made the following tweet. His death was reported to be a suicide.

There are probably a few lessons in that list. What did you get?

This Is The End

My wife and I got lucky. She emigrated from Japan in late December 2019, just days before 2020 rolled around. (My God, what happened to that whole year?) If she hadn’t come in those early weeks, we might still not be together. We didn’t lose anyone, but obviously many did. The Economist estimates 10 million dead worldwide. That’s more than the Holocaust.

Now that life is reemerging, it feels like things have changed—similar to how they changed after 9/11. It’s not that most of us did anything differently on 9/30 than we did on 9/10. Rather, a course has shifted that will take some time to realize.

Social media is done. That’s not to say it will die, but it’s not what it was just five years ago. It used to feel like we were really making friends. People would HIRL and travel to meet each other. Now, it feels like one big church potluck. We trade polite nothings with the fellows in our sect because those other people are dangerous, and let’s face it: empty promises are better than no promises at all.

I can like a picture of someone’s dinner while I’m half-watching TV and feel less alone for it. But that’s a lie.

It’s time to do something different.

My social media time is going to be cut way back. My art + fiction blog, Curiomancy, is going to be retired completely.

I’m starting a new project on Substack, The End of the World Almanac, which will be a kind of home base where I work through the sense and nonsense of life in the future.

I haven’t decided yet how best to make it interactive, but I have decided I’d rather have deeper interactions with few than superficial interactions with many.

Without ado, I’m inviting you to join. I’ll be honest. I’m still figuring out how it will work, but I’d like it to be a kind of interactive story-making machine, both a fantasy and a reality, that tries to make sense of our strange future.

So sign up now, before you forget—or the timeline changes again. If it sucks, you can always opt out later.

In the meantime, tell your friends! The more people we can get on board, the more fun and useful it will be.

Sincerely,

—Rick Wayne

(Art) The Imaginary Critters of Alexander Ostrowski

I enjoy the creature art of Alexander Ostrowski because he approaches his subjects similar to how I approach my novels, by imbuing the fantastic with a heavy dose of realism such that you can easily believe such things might actually exist.

In one sense, you could say that is the purest form of escapism: a fantasy you can almost believe because it borders reality. But there is something more here than the simplistic imaginings of a children’s cartoon or even the juvenile extravagance of a comic book. Although none of these creatures are real, they reveal in reflection the magic of what is by holding a mirror up to what could be.

Ostrowski’s subjects are both fantastical and mundane and range from griffons and basilisks (and a variety of tiny dragons) to speculations about the shape of alien life. He is putting together a book which is worth checking out. As always, find more by the artist here.

A book is a machine to think with. —I.A. Richards

(Sunday Thought) My God, it’s full of stars…

Why is 4 out of 5 stars good for a restaurant but near-catastrophic for an Uber driver? Why do hotels and movies have two kinds of ratings but books and consumer electronics only have one?

I mean, a rating is just a rating, right? If I like it, I give it more stars. If not, less.

Turns out, it’s not that simple.

If you’ve ever driven for Uber, or you know someone who has, then you know how hard they fight to get five stars from every rider. Why? Why do fractions of a star below perfection matter for rideshares but not for, say, food trucks or hair salons?

To start, you have to understand that consumers occupy a position of near-total uncertainty. We have no idea which coffee maker is best for us, or whether it’s worth it to drive across town for a higher-rated mechanic? (Couldn’t the guy around the block fix the AC just as well?)

In the old days, consumers knew the price of a good or service and that was about it. Clever marketers would spend a lot of time designing branding and packaging that signaled certain cues in an attempt to nudge people to purchase. Unless we happened to know someone who had personal experience with the product, there was little to go on but looks and price.

If a shopper was contemplating a large purchase, such as a car or computer, they might consult a trusted expert or magazines like Consumer Reports, which made a living testing home appliances and financial services the like — products people were willing to research before buying.

But here, as everywhere, the internet cut out the middle man. With the arrival of the internet, consumers could start sharing our experiences directly with each other. If we had a bad experience with a doctor or lawn service, we could post it on sites like Google, where others could do the same.

That meant that star ratings, ostensibly a simple measure of quality, aggregate numerous experiences, and so indirectly measure a great many variables besides quality — for example, consistency.

Human are biologically risk-averse. They like consistency, which is why McDonald’s is perennially popular. We want to know what we are getting and will often choose a mediocre service that is consistently mediocre over one that is typically extraordinary but occasionally bad.

In other words, above a certain level, quality starts to matter less than other considerations, and those considerations vary by product.

The reason Uber drivers need 100% 5-star ratings is because a ride from point A to point B is effectively fungible. The biggest determinants of quality — traffic, weather, speed limit — are out of the control of the driver.

That didn’t use to be the case. We starting tipping taxi drivers because in the days before Google maps, local knowledge of shortcuts and alternate routes, not to mention real-time knowledge of congestion (communicated by CB radio), varied by driver, and a good one really could get you where you were going faster.

That’s largely not the case anymore. So, though taxis have not been fully automated, an important first step has already happened. Urban transportation has been commodified, and there is nothing more ripe for automation than the repetitive production of a commodity.

What does that have to do with star ratings? As much as they are risk-averse, humans also dislike choosing at random. Where they don’t have a reason, they will invent one (and rationalize it after the fact.) However, they’re also lazy, and the reason they invent will be the easiest, most minimally defensible one possible.

The easiest way to pick between Driver A and Driver B is star rating, because it’s staring right at us in the app. We may know there is no real, measurable different between a driver with 98% 5-star ratings and one with 97% 5-star ratings, but what other determinant is as simple and obviously available?

But what is true of Uber rides is not true of books or restaurants, where two of the same type will still be very different. Books are not commodities, not because they’re art per se but because there’s no accounting for taste.

How do you compare the latest Tom Green tearjerker to the latest installment of a space opera series, where both have roughly identical star ratings? Does that really mean we’re going to enjoy them equally?

Of course not. We know not every book is trying to be Shakespeare. Some are trying to be nothing more than a fun summer read, and if that’s what we enjoy (or think we will enjoy), then we want a book that does a good job of that, not one short-listed for the Booker Prize.

This is why hotels have multiple ratings on travel sites. The first, determined by the site, establishes the overall quality of the hotel. Five-star hotels are supposed to be the epitome of luxury. 2-star motels are a cheap place to crash for the night.

The second rating, aggregate customers reviews, determines how well the property met that expectation. You can have a 4-star 5-star hotel, for example, where they didn’t bring you fresh towels every day, and a 5-star 3-star hotel, where they did.

Online movie rental apps are getting at something similar when they include both an aggregate critic rating as well as an audience rating. The critic rating hints at what kind of movie it’s trying to be (no one listens to critics) and the audience rating lets you know how well it achieved that.

In my world, NUMBER of reviews matters more than star rating, which is why I’m constantly urging people not to feel bad about being honest. Above a certain level, it really doesn’t matter how many stars you give it. Really.

What’s matters is that you add your rating to the total number, because readers use total number of ratings as a proxy for popularity. A book with more reviews is assumed to have engaged more people, so readers consistently tend to pick, say, a 3.6-star book with 800 reviews over a 4.4-star book with 80.

(Partly, that’s because readers don’t know whether, in giving a book four stars, you are saying it was a 4-star book or that it did a 4-star job of being whatever kind of book it was trying to be. In conversation, people will even switch between the two without realizing it.)

This situation is unfortunate, in a sense. As a class, readers tend to pride themselves on their independence of thought, yet, when choosing a book, market research suggests they consistently follow the crowd, which is why publishers spend so much time and effort manipulating the NY Times bestseller lists.

(Art) Balls, Balls, Balls, Balls, Balls

You would think that after collecting and sharing hundreds of BIG BALL images, that would be it. But you would be wrong. Here is Part III. Part I is here and Part II is here.

(I don’t even collect these. I just think it’s funny how ubiquitous the Big Ball has become.)

(Art) The Humorous Fantasy of Tony Sart

In addition to his art for tabletop and video game properties, Tony Sart also illustrates the humorous side of fantasy, be it goblin pranks, a fierce warrior on the toilet (in his fuzzy slippers), vampires playing Russian roulette with a sunbeam, a necromancer hugging her first raised corpse, or Lord of the Rings in the modern age. My favorite is gender-armor swapping. Enjoy something lighthearted this holiday.

Find more by the artist, including his commercial work, here.

(Sunday Thought) Fixing the News

What’s worst about social media comes not from the platform itself but the advertiser model. Algorithms, which drive political division and misinformation, were meant to drive engagement for advertisers. The more you’re engaged, the longer you stay on the site. The longer you stay on the site, the more ads you see. The more ads you see, the more money the platform makes.

On a subscriber model, there’s an entirely different incentive. The platforms want you to be happy enough to keep your subscription, of course, but beyond that, they have no particular incentive to keep the load high on their servers. Think Netflix versus Facebook.

If that’s true, then is the problem social media? Or, is the problem our unwillingness to pay for it? Seems to me “you get what you pay for” generally applies.

So, too, in journalism. Are we really surprised at the quality of news we don’t pay for? After all, someone has to, and if that’s not us, are we really surprised that the news serves their interests and not ours?

More and more, that interest is a partisan interest. And look where we are.

Incidentally, the problem of free news is different than the problem of open science. Scientists are not funded by readers, where, if we don’t pay for a research paper, science suffers. This is why the science publication market is such a corporate scam, especially when they’re charging for research funded by taxpayers! We should continue to press for open, free access to science.

But if we want news (and social media) to serve the great mass of people, rather than the narrow extremes, then the great mass of people are going to have to start paying for it. And that means you and me.

The problem is that there are many news sources, and staying informed — staying ahead of bias — means reading widely from many of them. This is different than the situation with Netflix.

Because no one new outlet has a handle on truth, good access to news is wide access to news. A subscriber model means I have to pay for so much more than I could ever consume (or, indeed, even want to consume). Some people can’t afford ten subscriptions a month. Others will object to regularly funding certain news organizations and retreat to their islands of belief.

Newspapers could cure some of their woes, then, and ours, if they moved to a token system where, instead of subscribing to a particular newspaper, we subscribed to a reseller (at an up-charge) who gave us access to a range of sites.

You wouldn’t have unlimited access. Instead, your annual subscription would buy you a set number of monthly digital tokens, based on your plan, that could be exchanged at various rates for access to specific articles, or to the latest issue, or to the whole periodical for, say, 24 hours if you were a student needing to do research on a particular topic.

Newspapers could set their rates. The Economist might want to charge two tokens for a standard article compared to the The Columbus Dispatch’s one. They also might charge more for longer articles or for an investigative series.

But under this system, a single monthly subscription would give you access to a wider range of outlets than you might otherwise support individually, and it gives news outlets access to a wider paying audience than the subscription model allows. It also allows new or smaller outlets, who will have a harder time attracting subscribers, a chance to enter the market and challenge the older, established ones.

News outlets will still court subscribers, of course, just as they still court advertisers. But that’s good. Maintaining a diversity of revenue streams, I would argue, makes it easier for the paper to pursue topics that may not be popular with any one of them.

Resellers would make money the way gyms and gift cards do. Gyms lose money on regular gym-goers, but more people have a gym membership, or receive a gift card, than use it, which means revenue exceeds cost.

There are drawbacks to this system, to be sure. It wouldn’t prevent ideological clustering, for example. And it doesn’t force people to be better consumers of news. But it does reintroduce a common market, which the world surely needs if we are going to heal our partisan divisions ahead of war.

More importantly, it’s better than what we have now, where newspapers, following social media, are pursuing “audience capture.” They’re becoming more partisan (and less reliable) in an effort to drive high engagement among a set audience while at the same time driving that audience like cattle away from all others, a market strategy that will have long-term consequences for those raised in it.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one—or both. Usually both. —Susan Sontag

(Art) Science Crimes in Progress

The Zero Signal, the first Science Crimes Division mystery, officially releases today in paperback and digital.

Here’s what readers are saying:

“The imaginative worldbuilding, the complex characters and the sheer scope that’s both shown and at time hinted at, reveal a world that both breathtaking and scary.” -Goodreads review

“Given that a lot of cyberpunk tropes have long become reality, the question is where to go next. This provides a convincing answer.” -Amazon review

“The dialogue between the characters is something special. Each conversation not only advances the plot but also opens a window into the characters themselves. The natural way characters interact with each other, even in the more fantastic scenes, is just very believable and it’s really easy to become attached to them.” -Goodreads review

“This is a phenomenal sci-fi mystery that really got me thinking. I also quite like the premise – what happens when the power of science is accessible to the average person.” -Amazon review

“Loved the attention to detail!”-Goodreads review

“I’ll be reading the next book in the Science Crimes series, for sure.” -Goodreads review

To celebrate, here is a gallery of related art, some of which inspired parts of the story. Others were found later and collected for their similarity. (Comment for the name of any of the artists.)

Get the book here.