Sunday Agenda
- Check in
- Opening Blessing
- Review WWWs
- Weekly event logistics
- Review Agenda
- 10 minutes on Winter Solstice
- 20 minutes Strategy/Tactics Talk
- Evaluations
- Closing Blessing
Check-in
- Brandon … Fine … our house is getting all ready for the Solstice. It’s all decorated with trees, holly, deer, squirrels masks… went to bed really late last night
- Ben … My battery just died and I really should get something new (laptop or battery)
- Eric … I went to bed late too because I stayed up playing Castles of Burgandy with Patrick.
Opening Blessing
The wheel of time, it keeps on turning, and we get what we get. I guess you could say God is Change. May we together shape God and find peace, joy, and love amidst God. --Blessed Be
WW(W)s from last time
- Brandon … spend 15 minutes every day on Machine Learning … ongoing
- Brandon … make a daily 1 minute video check-in for Ben and Eric … ongoing
- <s>Brandon … Meditate regularly with Eric … ongoing</s>
- Ben … meditate regularly with Eric ... ongoing
- <s>Ben … spend at least 15 minutes a day on Flight in a Cage … ongoing</s>
- Ben … Send Brandon/Eric a video message each day about what I did … ongoing
- Eric … Send Brandon/Ben a video message each day about what I did … ongoing
- <s>Eric … Work on Buckleberry at least 15 minutes a day… ongoing
- Eric … Meditate regularly with Ben … ongoing
- Eric … Meditate regularly with Brandon … ongoing</s>
WW(W)s
- Brandon … spend 15 minutes every day on Machine Learning … ongoing
- Brandon … make a daily 1 minute video check-in for Ben and Eric … ongoing
- Brandon … Meditate regularly with Eric … ongoing
- Ben … invite SF&F Book Club and others to Solstice … by tonight
- Ben … meditate regularly with Eric ... ongoing
- Ben … spend at least 15 minutes a day on Flight in a Cage … ongoing</s>
- Ben … Send Brandon/Eric a video message each day about what I did … ongoing
- Eric … Send Brandon/Ben a video message each day about what I did … ongoing
- Eric … Work on Buckleberry at least 15 minutes a day… ongoing
- Eric … Meditate regularly with Ben … ongoing
- Eric … Meditate regularly with Brandon … ongoing
Weekly Events Logistics
Service rotation: Eric, Ben, Shelley, Brandon
- Dec 10 Service: 8:00 AM PDT / 11:00 EDT … Ben
- Dec 11 Business Call: 8:00 AM PDT / 11:00 EDT
Winter Solstice
- Brandon purchased some additional LEGOs, an awesome robot-building set and one more power functions set … with Ben's motor and battery box we could build up to 3 climbers
- Eric plans to burn the galaxy plate at the moment of Solstice and make a checkin video of it
- Eric will get the LEGO pieces for a climber together ahead of time
- Take a step toward following the rules of the climber contest at the Space Elevator Conference?
- Brandon could ask his dad to help make "satellites" to carry up the ribbon
Schedule
Portland: 7296 SW St John Pl, Portland, OR 97223
- Start Time: 4:30 PST / 19:30 EST
- Video intros
- Build climbers
- Pizza & Snacks in Portland: 6:30 / 21:30 EST
- Climbing: 7:30ish PST / 22:30 ish EST
- Galaxy plate ritual: 8:00 PST / 23:00 EST
Gatineau
- Dinner: 18:30 EST 15:30 PST
- Video intros: 19:30 EST / 16:30 PST
- Building climber: 20:00 EST / 17:00 PST
- Climbing: 22:30 EST / 19:30 PST Synch!
- Galaxy plate ritual: 23:00 EST / 20:00 PST Synch!
TODOs
- Invitations
- Ben: invite Ben's parents, Redmond SF&F book club, Bryan Laubscher, Michael Laine
- Brandon: invite Keith, Sarvatas, Sequoia and Ren’s friends
- Portland Meetup
- Food … order pizza?
Strategy Talk
Six Thinking Hats
- Green … brainstorming
- Yellow … positive (Sunny) evaluation
- Black … negative (Shadow) evaluation
- Red … emotional
- White … logic only
- Blue … process (noticing which hat is happening, actively selecting a hat)
Red Hatting
- Start a Shiny Party that promotes science better than any existing party, as well as voting reform using ranked-choice ballots and auditable cryptographic proof of who's voting so we wouldn't have to trust the voting-machine companies. Also promotes ConsensusPolling and other methods for better decision making in a networked age.
- Eric … mixed, honors my dad’s efforts toward rank choice, discouraged that we could succeed, worried that it might take us away from the core of SolSeed
- Brandon … optimistic that now is an opening that I haven't felt for these things before, worried that it would detract from the core, worried that it would become a slog
- Ben … highly doubtful that this would get anywhere and frightened that if it did, it would take on a life of its own that would pull it away from green values
Work on ways to preserve good things about civilization through a climate-disrupted dark age
- Work with the Long Now Foundation
- We could start an open-source collaborative project to build a tech tree like in Civilization-type games, but with instructions for how to really do it, and a focus on making the resulting civilization sustainable
- Ben … afraid this may be the only worthwhile thing on the list, sounds like sad to work on (sucking energy rather than giving energy)
- Eric … excited about it, hopeful that it could bring us together with a lot of other groups, and relaxed that it wouldn’t strain us and we could work on other things too
- Brandon … repelled by the dark age part of it, attracted by the positive future parts of it, sounds fun to work on a game, worried that it would be divisive of our core group
Deepening our practices (internal audience)
- Work on a mechanism to have asynchronous services
- Work on stabilizing our new blog-writing practice and promoting our own blog
- Improving our celebrations, e.g. hold more events in places with dark skies so we can see lots of stars and the Milky Way
- Brandon … confident that this top level goal will make progress in some or all of these directions based on our the inertia of SolSeed
- Ben … un-confident that our blogging practice is going to get seriously going without a strategic effort, ashamed to have told people in our newsletter that we started the blogging practice and then have had it never happen
- Eric … shiny excitement about the asynchronous services, comfort and connection excitement about the blog writing practice, defensive at the "improve our celebrations" piece because I love our celebrations and it feels disloyal
Recruiting (external audience)
- Re-start the book program (we have a bunch of PotS copies)
- Create one or more videos about the concept of Shiny Green
- Create videos of us talking about our visions
- Create a Lauren Olamina page on Facebook and speak as the 7 year old Lauren Olamina (hopefully with the help of an actual black woman) … follow her life and journal as her
- Contact some possibly kindred people such as David Duemler
- Hold a Star Trek 50th Anniversary celebration
- Eric … content with who we have, but happy that we had a book program and would be happy to continue with it, proud of the videos before they even exist
- Brandon … optimistic that the videos might follow from the blogging practice as we seek content for it, ambivalent toward the book program, attracted to the idea of more people like us but repelled by the logistics of doing the program
- Ben … attracted wonderful to have more members, frightened of rejection if we approach people directly, excited to work on video where you were holding me accountable to getting it finished, confused about how the book program is supposed to help exactly
Place Making (largely internal audience)
- Build a SolSeed temple
- Build a SolSeed shrine
- Build the Auberge Paradis and Buckleberry bed-and-breakfast resorts (external audience)
- Build a Gaia shrine at Buckleberry
- Start un-farming termites at Buckleberry
- Build an astronomy tower on top of the Hill at Buckleberry with a planetarium in it.
- Try un-farming goats at Buckleberry using fermented saw dust as feed.
- Brandon … pretty attracted to the shrine, it feels right-scale for what we could do, we could do something cool for $10,000 as opposed to $1 million or something
- Ben … I am so excited by the idea of building something cool with SolSeed’s name on it that it makes me want to ignore the challenges of raising funds and battling zoning and so forth … I am inspired by the idea of building a temple in Portland and having it be the way that we go mainstream … that’s the way I feel about it
- Eric … I am totally committed to this … I obsess about this continuously … I have a "that's where I'm going to live" feeling of comfort about it
Art (internal and external audience)
- Re-start the Gaia statue Kickstarter project
- Build a big model of the Milky Way with many blue and yellow lights representing stars, and green lights that can be turned on to symbolize life spreading … maybe bring it to Burning Man
- Re-start the music video project for The Seed
- Start a new music video project, e.g. Rise Anew
- Make posters and t-shirts and sell them online … we could have a whole separate brainstorm about what imagery to create for these
- Ben … I feel personally drawn to doing this work … I love it when you motivate me to make art that I would otherwise be too lazy or distracted to make … I feel a duty to make art that says important things (i.e., motivate people to see possibilities) which Rise Anew would be an example of
- Brandon … I feel great when I work on beautiful masks or the Galaxy Plate or other aesthetic expressions of the SolSeed convictions … I want to do it as a way of just expressing myself
- Eric … I covet that large Gaia statue … I'm becoming disappointed in the Galaxy Plate that I have, so I'm excited about the idea of building a bigger Milky Way model … I was deeply happy about the videos and music that we've made, and I want to make more … I'm less excited about the posters and t-shirts because they seem less special
Science fiction (external audience)
- Finish and publish Flight in a Cage
- Try to publish some of our short stories in science fiction magazines
- Apply for one of us to attend the Clarion West science-fiction writers workshop
- Hold a SolSeed discussion panel at a science fiction convention
- Brandon … I feel like an enthusiastic cheerleader for this effort, … not sure that I would be able to contribute directly, I feel like others have it covered better and I don't have a lot to contribute, although I'm happy to contribute … but I love it and feel it could be amazing for us
- Ben … I have mixed feelings, on the one hand I love science fiction and feel that my SolSeed work is partly an expression of that love for envisioning spacefaring futures … on the other hand I’m dissatisfied with my ability to write fiction that really shows people the importance of SolSeed’s ideas ... and am worried that defining it as fiction will actually push people away from helping us try to make such a future real.
- Eric … I want so much to finish reading Flight in a Cage, it's a deeply satisfying book to read … I love the idea of publishing short stories in SF magazines, because I feel pride about some of my SF stories, although I fear that the magazine editors won't get my stories
Sharing our ideas (external audience)
- Write a series of blog entries commenting on and critiquing the developing SpaceX plans to colonize Mars from a Humanistic Pagan / Earthseed perspective
- Re-start the The Book of Life project / Write our own version of The Millennial Project
- Promote the Concerning AI podcast more to reach a wider audience
- Start a Kickstarter to print more copies of Happy in the Sun and start creating new kid's books about Empathy and Wisdom
- Blogging about our projects
- Ben ... I would feel very proud if we finished something like The Book of Life ... it would make SolSeed feel more real to me because I could give people this book and say “This is us!” … our idea sharing schemes feel important but kind of less life-giving than the idea of making art or building things
- Brandon … I'd like to have this stuff, but I don't want to make this stuff … and like Ben, I find more juice in more aesthetic expression of what SolSeed means and can mean
- Eric … Of these ideas, I find it most comforting to just blog about our projects, although I would definitely follow a blog about SpaceX
Research (external audience)
- Research the Simulation Hypothesis and possibly add simulism to our religion … write a paper explaining the objective evidence for it (if there is any) and how it could be falsified (or perhaps how the “we are not a simulation” hypothesis could be falsified).
- Do something related to the "reactionless" microwave thruster, e.g. an analysis of how much power it would take to move something big
- Publish an AI Paper
- Do some more simple CELSS experiments
- Brandon … If we hadn't just recently talked about the Art category, I would feel more inspired by this, but comparatively I just feel much more inspired by the art … again, the art is a lot more heart, and this is a lot more neocortex
- Ben … in general I would love to have scientific results to show the world, but I don’t want to do the hard work to get them ... CELSS experiments would be what I felt most passionate about doing if I had enough passion … the Simulation Hypothesis repels me because it feels like a resurrection of the Sky God mythos.
- Eric … of these, I'm most excited about the simple CELSS experiments because I can imagine doing them at Buckleberry … I feel mischievous curiosity about how it would turn out if we added Simulism to our religion
Evaluation
- Eric … I enjoy doing these calls earlier in the day because I'm not so tired during them
- Ben … I dislike doing these calls so early because I am really tired during them.
(Brandon left early)
Closing Blessing
The hour hand on the clock has turned one more hour, and during that time we have caressed the clay that is God. It takes a lot longer to shape the clay, and so we must continue the work throughout the weeks and months and years and decades ahead. May our perseverence outweigh the obstacles before us. -- Blessed Be