Off the deep end

Most of what's on this site is bloated, unfinished, unfunny, or uninteresting. Some of it isn't. All of it's here. And so am I. That's about all this place is.

I build things with AI tools and I write about building things with AI tools. Sometimes I write earnest pieces about repairable software and human agency. Sometimes I build a fictional company that sells a wristband which approves code while you sleep and can't be removed without a screwdriver that doesn't exist yet.

Both of these are the same activity.

The earnest stuff is how I figure out what I think. The satire is how I stress-test it. If I can build a pixel-perfect product page for the exact thing I'm arguing against — and it's funny, and it's accurate, and you can't quite tell where the joke stops and the real industry starts — then maybe the argument holds up. If the satire doesn't land, the thinking was probably shallow.

Sometimes I feel myself going off the deep end creatively and I let it happen. It's all words, thoughts, scenarios, characters. They help me explore how I feel. Maybe they help you too. I don't know. You're here, so something worked.

The deep end, specifically

Chasm Logic is the big one. A fictional tech company universe — deadpan corporate absurdism, product pages for things that shouldn't exist, internal memos from people named after rocks. It started as a joke about three-key keyboards and turned into a whole world with a QA department and an HR problem called Doug.

rubin-on-rails is a real tool wrapped in a pun. Rick Rubin's creative philosophy applied to AI-assisted development. It works. The joke is permission to be earnest.

The rest is scattered across /explore and /fun. Notes, experiments, half-formed ideas. Some are growing. Some are stuck. All of them are honest about what they are.

Traditions I'm drawing from

I didn't set out to study comedy. I just kept making things and then noticing that other people had been making the same kind of thing for a very long time. If any of this resonates, these are worth falling into:

Menippean satire — mocking something by building a perfect replica of it. Swift's A Modest Proposal is the obvious ancestor. The technique is older than that. If you can't tell the difference between the satire and the real thing, that's the point.

Defamiliarization (остранение) — Shklovsky, 1917. Making the familiar strange by describing it too precisely. You stop seeing keyboards as normal when someone specs out what pressing "1" four hundred times a day actually looks like.

Pataphysics — Jarry, 1890s. "The science of imaginary solutions." Take a real principle, extend it past its own logic until it breaks. Biometric monitoring, taken seriously, approving production deployments during dental appointments.

The eiron — Greek comedy's understater. Wins by pretending to know less than they do. The opposite of the braggart. "I don't understand, can you explain?" — and then the other person explains themselves into a wall.

Commedia dell'arte — stock characters in improvised scenarios. The characters are fixed, the situations are new. Brock Granite is Il Capitano. Jasmine Clay is Colombina — the only competent person on stage. The format is the stage.

Absurdism — not Monty Python. Camus. The gap between searching for meaning and the universe's silence. The response isn't despair — it's continuing anyway, fully aware. I'm tightening bolts on a steampunk deathtrap while others ride cybersuits. That's a choice I can explain.

The Fool — not the jester. The Fool in King Lear. The only character who tells the king the truth, and he can only do it because he's the fool. He disappears halfway through the play. Nobody knows why. Maybe because once the truth is visible, the delivery mechanism isn't needed anymore.

The den — the story told through what someone left behind. Scrawlings on maintenance corridor walls. Arrows pointing to exits. Poetry quoted from memory in a place nobody was supposed to still be living. The narrative isn't in the text — it's in the evidence that someone was here, saw clearly, wrote it down, and left before you arrived. You assemble the person from fragments. The fragments are more honest than a memoir. Sometimes the cube talks back.

None of this was planned. I didn't read Shklovsky and then build a product page. I built the product page and then found out Shklovsky had named what I was doing a hundred years ago. That's how most of this works. You make something, you notice a pattern, you find out the pattern has a name, and suddenly you're in a conversation with people you'll never meet.

Maybe that's what this site is. Half the conversation. Your half is wherever you are right now. I've been told the other half doesn't really talk. I've been told that before.