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Religion in the Age of Stories
I prompted Perplexity to write an essay based on the seventy-five posts in the Religion category on my blog. (First one was in 2004.) Rather than have this written in my own voice with first-person interjections, I told Perplexity to present it more as a third-person commentary on “this blogger’s” long-running engagement with religion.
Across more than seventy posts in the “Religion” category, Steve Mays treats religion less as a pipeline to cosmic truth and more as an old, resilient operating system for human behavior and meaning. It sits alongside money, nations, ideologies, and corporations as one more way humans coordinate action through shared stories. In this framing, gods and doctrines are not unique intrusions from beyond the universe; they are examples of the broader human habit of inventing fictions powerful enough that people will kill and die for them. Continue reading
Mr. Buckle from “It’s A Gift” (W.C. Fields)
Click image above for some W.C. Fields genius.
New deck: Ready for Trex
Russian recruits surviving only minutes
(Perplexity) “Russian soldiers deployed to the front lines in Ukraine are surviving an average of just 20 to 35 minutes once they reach combat positions, according to Russian military bloggers cited by Oxford historian Peter Frankopan in a Foreign Policy essay published June 25. The total life expectancy of a new recruit — from arrival at a training ground to death — lies somewhere between 10 days and three weeks.“
Trex
“Trex is the giant of the composite decking industry. Founded in 1996 by four executives who bought the rights to a wood-alternative technology from Mobil, it essentially created the entire modern composite deck category. It has evolved quite a bit into a major outdoor living brand.” More » This :14 video illustrates how flexible the material is.
One of Trex’s biggest selling points is its massive recycling footprint. Every standard Trex composite board is made of 95% recycled and reclaimed materials. The recipe is pretty straightforward:
- Recycled Plastic Film: They are one of the largest recyclers of plastic bags, wrap, and packaging film in North America, having diverted billions of pounds of plastic from landfills.
- Reclaimed Wood: They use reclaimed industrial sawdust and wood scrap (like leftovers from cabinet makers and flooring factories) rather than harvesting fresh timber.
The Forever Book
“I recently gave Claude the task of selecting a seed library: the best set of books for rebooting civilization from scratch. It curated 200 books across fields as diverse as medicine, metallurgy, and mathematics. It did a remarkably great job. Many of its choices were classics, ones I would have chosen myself. It also pulled in obscure tomes that only a real student of do-it-yourself would be familiar with, and hauled in from far corners some very informative books of practical knowledge I had never heard of. Overall, it accumulated a strong list, among the best I have seen.”
New Deck: Phase One
We replaced the original deck to our home in 2015 and I guess we thought it would last more than eleven years but it was getting dangerous.
Step one for the new deck is taking down the old one. Took the guys about 90 minutes. Video above runs about 2 minutes. Gotta have a good deck. [Watch video above on YouTube]
Phase Two
Looking back at the dot-com bubble
The dot-com bubble (and subsequent crash) happened over a two-and-a-half-year period between 2000 and 2002 (the year I started the blog). I was reminded of this period while watching a video comparing the current AI frenzy to Tulip Mania back in the 17th century.
I couldn’t remember if my early blog posts touched on the dot-com period so I prompted Perplexity to take a look and it came back with a “looking back at the dot‑com bubble” post (see below). This is just the latest example of how my resolve to not let AI bots write my blog posts is slowly eroding. After one read I knew I could not improve on this summary.
(Perplexity) If my archive is any indication, I didn’t spend the bubble years themselves writing hot takes about it. The more interesting stuff came later, in the early 2000s, when it was obvious the web had outlived its first speculative fever dream.
One of the clearest snapshots is a June 11, 2003 post I titled “Markets as conversations,” where I pulled a quote (via Denise Howell / David Weinberger) that still reads like a verdict on the whole episode: “The Bubble was never what the Internet was about. The Web is not primarily a commercial space, not even primarily an information space… The bubble went away, but the Web absolutely didn’t. The Web remains interesting and important.” I didn’t add much commentary because I didn’t need to; posting it was endorsement enough.
By April 2005, I was pointing readers to a BusinessWeek cover story, “Blogs Will Change Your Business,” and highlighting this contrast: “The dot‑com era was powered by companies — complete with programmers, marketing budgets, Aeron chairs, and burn rates. The masses of bloggers, by contrast, are normal folks with computers… and — that’s right — no bubble.” I liked that line so much I reproduced the whole setup, emphasizing that we’d moved from company‑driven “New Economy” hype to what they called “media of the masses.”
Around those posts, there’s a steady drip of “Early Net Culture” items that implicitly answer the question, “What actually survived the crash?” In June 2003 I noted Google News beating BBC and MSNBC for a Webby and mused about how AP’s real asset had been its “connectedness” — something the open web was now replicating for everyone. The question “Can we agree that has changed forever?” wasn’t framed as bubble commentary, but it’s about what didn’t revert to normal once the NASDAQ fell.
A couple of years later I was citing ad forecasts that put Google and Yahoo’s combined online ad revenue on par with the prime‑time haul of ABC, CBS and NBC, calling it a “watershed moment” in the evolution of the internet as an advertising medium. If the bubble was about speculative eyeballs, this was about actual budgets moving. Same network executives, different direction for the money.
So, reading my own trail backwards, my “dot‑com bubble” coverage is less about the boom and crash and more about the quiet, durable things that came after: the idea that the web was never just a stock chart; that normal people with cheap tools and “no burn rate” might be more important than the Aeron‑chair start‑ups; and that news, advertising, and culture were re‑routing themselves through a network that turned out not to be a fad.
“Before Digital Had A Name”
This post was written by a “team” of AI agents/bots running on Phil Atkinson’s (long time friend and former co-worker) computers. He gave the bots two documents I wrote several years ago, chronicling Learfield’s early experiences with the Internet and the emerging digital world, tasking them to summarize.
Learfield Data, Learfield’s early Internet work, and the Phil/Steve overlap
Learfield’s best early technology work was not about being “an Internet company.” It was about finding trapped information, moving it through a cheaper or faster channel, and discovering who valued the result. That habit began before the web, with satellite sideband data, weather, crash reports, wire copy, and affiliate services. The web did not replace the habit. It exposed the same habit to a bigger audience, looser rights boundaries, weaker business models, and much more operational complexity.