Archives

14 posts published

2026

September

Optimaxx Part 2.

Work as fulfilled several central roles in the life of Sean Fuentes. Any waking hour he did not spend at the gym, he spent there. Grinding. Crushing it. Putting in the hours showing he had the Founder mentality. Like the city itself and almost every other institution within it, Overseer Systems had an internal ranking for every employee, every team, every business unit. The system was ruthlessly meritocratic. Every second you worked, your ranked increased, every second you took a break it decreased. No exceptions. The Founders were at the top, much like they were in every list in 2moachan City, inspiring their employees to go the extra mile, do that extra rep. There was a 158” holo display in the lobby that cycled through the various rankings, with the All Hands ranking always showing on the right hand side. Sean stood, spitting his flavorless gum into a kleenex while waiting for the lists to cycle through. This was his morning ritual. He wouldn’t look at the All Hands ranking until he saw his position in his own business unit. 25 second later there it was and there he was, Sean Fuentes, VP of Urban Accounts, North America. Top of his business unit, as he had been the last 83 weeks. He pumped his fist slightly in a practiced gesture of mild celebration and allowed his eyes to slide over to the other board.

August

Optimaxx Part 1

The morning routine was always started at 5 am and was conducted with all the rigor and humanity of a GPU chip fab procedure. Before even getting out of bed, Sean Fuentes would check in with his wellness and longevity monitoring agents to update himself on his performance during the just finished fatigue refresh and cerebral defragmentation cycle. No one above Ascendant Tier 5 called it sleep anymore. Alongside time and the amount of REM sleep he had gotten, he monitored himself for metabolic exchange, right brain activity, ox levels, fat burning, thetas, testosterone production, how often he moved in his sleep, expressed gas and the frequency, length and strength of his nighttime erections. The agent fed the data directly to the 2maochan City Productivity Ranking database and showed him his performance against all other Alpha ranked males of his Tier and against the optimal values for peak ascendancy potential.

July

Where the soul lives

My parents have a house on the east coast of the United States, right in the middle of New England. They were first invited to visit by family friends in the early-mid 80s and have been returning to it with a seasonal rhythm to rival migratory fowl. I myself can count on only a few fingers the years where I have not spent some measure of time on this particular shore. Over the past three and a half decades, it has been a central spoke around which my nomadic meandering across the globe have spun. It is a haven, where the soul may shed the annoyances and burdens of everyday life for just a short while. The house itself is a more recent addition in this saga. by which I mean to say that they bought it a mere 15 years ago. Piddling really.

The road goes ever and ever on...

It took until I was what society deems to be a fully mature adult before I felt empowered to allow my freak flag to fully fly: I was a proper nerd and I didn’t care who knew it!! To be fair, it was 2011 and nerd media empires Geek & Sundry and Nerdist were on the verge of being birthed, catapulting names like Chris Hardwick and Felicia Day to internet fame, returning Wil Wheaton temporarily to the lime light as a proponent of board games and a kind of geek philosopher and forming the chrysalis for the actual play juggernaut that is Critical Role. (Team Visibitch!). It is remarkable how central these two media entities were when Nerd Culture was just taking its first, shaky steps into the mainstream, and how little of the original projects is left. The genealogical map between those two networks and Dropout is nothing more than a thick red line. Their work has spread like pollen, sprouting into a thousand podcast networks and YouTube channels, though they themselves only exist as wan shades of their former selves.

June

Mid-life crisis by way of owned media...

Earlier this year, I engaged in a fairly standard activity for a man my age with aging parents: I cleaned out a bunch of crap that was lying around their house dating back from when I was a teenager. While I have on occasion returned to the parental abode in the unnumbered (for I refuse to count them) decades since I left my teens behind me, I had always seemed to leave more things there then I ended up taking with me. This was likely largely due to the Global Nomad existence I was engaged in from my late teens well into my 30s. Which is a long way of me saying that I had accumulated a lot of detritus to clear out.

Memories of an evening long ago

The World Cup is and always has been more than a mere sporting event. Most likely driven through the sheer universality of the sport, it seems to be the one thing that transcends the strictures and moats of language and culture. To some extent it is, to appropriate a legendary Pacinoism, “like God’s own cosmic gag reel” that we as a species have carved untold diverse, beautiful civilizations from the hostile, uncaring stuff of the universe, yet the most basic universal language we have found is “kick ball with feet into net”.