Cow Milking, Cud Chewing, and Flying Monkeys

How I spend my time - for anyone who is actually curious

Lots of activity last week on this Substack. This week is a bit of a lull. I thought I would take the opportunity to supply some general background on how I spend my professional time these days, just in case anyone is curious as to how these various pieces fit together.

So, this is a good post to ignore if you don’t actually care about that!

I get the best results by spending a couple of hours in the morning writing new material, then spending the rest of the day working on unrelated projects. This makes it possible for some kind of background process to happen such that when I sit down again the next morning I actually have something to write.

When that process is up and running, I call it Milking the Cow.

You can’t milk a cow 24/7, you have to milk her for a short time and then let her go out to pasture and be a cow for the rest of the day, chewing her cud and so on. Likewise with writing or any other form of focused creative work.

Because I am a nerd, my non-writing activities–Cud Chewing–tend to be of a technical nature. As of this year, I have been programming computers in one way or another for half a century, starting in 1974 with CARDIAC and moving on in short order to working in BASIC on a teletype connected to an acoustic modem.

I also have a rudimentary knowledge of various practical thing-making operations such as machining, welding, CAD, blacksmithing, 3D printing and so on.

The enemy of progress in all of these areas is Flying Monkeys, which is my term for distracting or stress-inducing obligations that come up unpredictably and force me to divert attention and energy away from milking the cow.

I long ago explained, in “Why I am a Bad Correspondent,” some of the approaches I take to reducing the number of Flying Monkeys that enter my life. An update to that, called “Why I am a Sociomediapath,” is on my personal website.

The very existence of this Substack is, to some degree, a departure from all of that. We’ll see how it goes.

Cow Milking program for 2024

In October of 2024, my longtime publisher HarperCollins will publish POLOSTAN, which is the first volume of BOMB LIGHT, a projected series of historical novels set during the 1930s and 1940s. The overall through line of the story is developments in physics during that period, leading up to the development of the atomic bomb. The general approach is similar to that of CRYPTONOMICON and THE BAROQUE CYCLE in that the books depict real events and real historical characters, however the main characters are fictional. I have been working on the series, on and off, since about 2013, but interrupted it several times to publish other books.

The process of publishing a book inevitably generates a certain number of Flying Monkeys, making it difficult to get back into a regular cow-milking rhythm, however I already have a substantial chunk of the second volume written. Later in 2024 I intend to get back to Milking the Cow and finish that volume. The overall BOMB LIGHT series will comprise at least 3 volumes and will probably occupy all of my cow-milking production for the next several years.

I’ll definitely post more here about POLOSTAN as the publication date draws nearer.

Brief Cud Chewing retrospective

I first understood the Cow Milking/Cud Chewing dynamic in the mid-1980s. Prior to that I was consumed by the Protestant Work Ethic and tried to write 8 or more hours a day. This didn’t work out very well—I spent a couple of years toiling over a manuscript (never to be published) that was an incoherent mess. In 1987 I panicked and wrote the first draft of Zodiac in 2 weeks. Thereby coming to understand that spending more time on writing wasn’t necessarily more productive.

Some of my cud chewing activities over the years have been very nuts and bolts stuff such as construction work and machining, but I’ve also put in long stints at Blue Origin and Magic Leap.

The M Word

My life took an interesting turn in late October of 2021 when Facebook changed its name to Meta and announced that they were a Metaverse company now. In short order, other big companies also announced that they, too, were working on the Metaverse. This in turn prompted countless startups to flock into that market. The year 2022 thus became the Year of the M Word. When I went to SXSW in March of 2022, I literally couldn’t turn around without seeing the M Word splashed across a poster or video screen.

For me this was the biggest Flying Monkey of my life to date. I made the decision that I would devote calendar year 2022 to launching some initiatives in this area. I knew that eventually some other trend would along to replace the Metaverse in the high tech hype cycle. I wanted to start something that would be sustainable and productive nevertheless. My goal was that at the beginning of 2023 I would return to the accustomed cow milking routine and get back to work on the BOMB LIGHT books.

This post is going to be a lot longer than I want it to be if I explain those initiatives in detail, and so I’m going to reserve that for future posts on this Substack. They break down into Laying Foundations for the Open Metaverse; Building a Metaverse Place I’d Actually Want to Visit; and Carbon. I’ll cover these briefly below.

Laying Foundations for the Open Metaverse

If the Metaverse actually happens, I would prefer for it to be as decentralized and open as possible. A lot is entailed in that statement, and I’m not going to try to cover it in detail here. I was able to air my thoughts on the topic in a talk at SIGGRAPH in 2022, which was part of a larger program called Building the Open Metaverse organized by Marc Petit and Patrick Cozzi, who continue to run an active podcast on this topic. The talk is up on the SIGGRAPH site if you are interested in seeing it. It begins at 8:50, but the first part is aimed at the SIGGRAPH audience of serious computer graphics geeks and as such is a highly technical trip down memory lane. Part 2 begins at about 19:00 and might be of more general interest.

(The whole video is more than 3 hours long but that’s because it includes multiple speakers. My part of it winds up at about 46:00)

In a format more customized for game developers, I gave another such talk at DICE in 2023.

The upshot of both the SIGGRAPH and the DICE talks is that I believe that there is a lot of overlap between what is needed to make an open decentralized Metaverse, and the capabilities of blockchain technology. Lamina 1 was founded for that purpose and launched in June of 2022. In May of 2024 it launched mainnet, meaning that it’s now an active blockchain. I took a more active role during the last half of 2022. At the beginning of 2023 I became the Chairman, with Rebecca Barkin being the CEO. The Chairman role minimizes the number of Flying Monkeys that interrupt the process of Milking the Cow.

Building a Metaverse Place I’d Actually Want to Visit

I do have specific ideas about what kind of Metaverse place I’d actually like to spend time in. It’s necessary to keep that in a separate lane from the open Metaverse in general. Any one specific creative project might succeed or fail. The whole point of the Metaverse is that it would comprise many different experiences produced and owned by different creators—not just the dude who happened to coin the term “Metaverse.”

The one I’ve been working on is called Whenere. The word is a combination of “when” and “where.” We haven’t said a lot about the project in detail yet, but that’ll change soon. It’s a follow-on to Virj, which I covered in a previous post.

Carbon

The Year of the Metaverse started at the same time as I was launching my novel Termination Shock, which is about climate change and geoengineering. Only a few months later we were talking about Lamina 1. I couldn’t very well get involved in a blockchain project without taking into consideration its carbon footprint. Modern blockchains use a “proof of stake” system that is orders of magnitude more energy efficient than the “proof of work” system pioneered by Blockchain, however there is still some energy usage. If the energy comes from burning fossil fuels, some carbon dioxide emissions will result. To make a long story short, Lamina 1 has ended up purchasing carbon offsets from Charm Industrial, rendering the whole thing carbon-neutral. But along the way I have had some interesting encounters in the world of carbon sequestration that I may talk about in future posts.