This is a placeholder for a lot of thoughts, eyes are forward but the mind looks back.
I’ve been settling a lot of paperwork, and relearning how to be and live. These past few years, and in particular the last 18+ months, were hard on the family. The pandemic was a backdrop. I miss Dad but the focus is now on Mom, and straightening accounts.
On to writing.
I have been writing about history, mythology and technology - and stumbled into a book. A handful of people who know me, care about me, or just have very big hearts, encouraged me. I have not been writing here but online and gathering friends.
I wrote a “sequel” to “2X21”, called “1648”. It was inspired by my thoughts on post-war societies, crypto, the metaverse, money, and art, all layered over a fiction story.
The year “1648” for me was about “the {eace of Westphalia”, the Dutch Golden Age, The massive Golden Age of Art (think Rembrandt, Vermeer and more), as well as the first publicly owned “Company”, the Dutch East India Company, and the first stock exchange to trade those shares.
Below is a sample “chapter” to share some of my original vision but I end up getting into the history of entertainment, art, creation, celebrity, and more.
Each “chapter” is a micro-dive into history and then a longer running fictional story.
The Dutch rose on a special stack of power. The reformation bundled the innovations and experiments of the Renaissance, like double-entry accounting, weapons, printing-press, better sailing ships, and things like “forced perspective” and realism in painting.
Anyway it’s a story that’s got legs. Some of you will see familiar historical references.
The “story” is set in the year “2X21”, sometime in the next 1000 years, and it’s a post-war society. There was a “Long War”, like the 30 and 80 years wars of the 1600s, and the 20th century’s 2 World Wars. A Triumverate, made of A.I.s, administrators and architects of a new kind of metaverse, a “Verse”, run the “System” as in solar system.
There’s more but I’ll just include links and move on.
First a “soundtrack”, music.
A link to a tweet of a Notion Page with music, and a link to one of those “threads” on twitter, except it’s the story and not 30 pearls of twitter wisdom.
THERE’s MUSIC for “1648”, a whole “soundtrack” with music for each chapter.
There’s a notion page, I’ve embedded it in the below chapter, “Art Made of Fragments”
But here’s a link to a twitter post of the Notion Page.
There’s a twitter “thread”.
Thanks for reading if you made it this far. This year is not last year. No going back.