Ian Pierce

Author: Ian

  • down here near the poison stream our god has gone insane

    On Monday I had a sustained panic attack that lasted for nearly an hour. I was sobbing, hyperventilating, the whole enchilada, if an enchilada can be made of cortisol and tears. I stayed on the phone with my parents for that whole time while they tried to calm me down. It worked, eventually, but the whole time I wanted to die, to have my throat close up and suffocate me, just because that would end the pain.

    I’m sure you can guess why I felt that way. It’s not every day that the president of your country threatens an entire 3000-year-old civilization with extinction just so he and his shitty friends can game the stock market. But that’s where we are. That’s where the last fifty years have led us, ever since billionaires used Ronald Reagan as a shill to sell Americans on the scam that if we let them exist without paying their fair share to the society that sustains and enables them, it will benefit us in the long run.

    We are building dystopia brick by brick, one that combines the surveillance of 1984 with the medicated numbness of Brave New World, and for what? So a handful of people can become trillionaires? So that moneyed pedophiles can escape accountability for raping underage girls? So we can cram AI that no one wants or likes into every physical objects? So boomers can die in their giant air-conditioned houses, surrounded by wealth that my generation will never know, like Egyptian pharaohs in their lavish tombs?

    I’m sick of it. I’m sick of the constant emotional trauma that these brigands force into my mind. I know this blog post is a rant, and that’s fine. Sometimes you need a place to rant. But if the next fifty years are going to be as exploitative and dehumanizing as the last fifty, I don’t see why I shouldn’t get off this elevator bound for the abyss right now.

    ~ Ian (listening to New Day Symptoms by Final Gasp)

  • drops of jupiter in your haaaair

    Wednesday was a gray, tempestuous day here in Seattle, just as we like it. What better occasion would there be, therefore, to ride the new 2 Line Crosslake Connector for the Link: the final piece of the ST2 light rail expansion, and the first ever floating rail bridge in the world?

    Overall, the train is an excellent addition to our transit landscape! I saw people coming home from a Mariners game, got some books at Half Price Books in Redmond, and snagged some great pictures.

    On a final note: it was just recently announced that Sound Transit has such a budget shortfall that they are not going to complete the ST3 expansion as Seattle voters approved it. That means that there will be no trains to Ballard, West Seattle, or Tacoma. This infuriates me for so many reasons.

    The biggest, however, is this: there are so many billionaires whose companies are destroying Seattle for working and disabled Seattleites. If Bezos wanted, he could simply write a check to Sound Transit for the expected budget shortfall and do something – anything – to redress the damage he’s done. But he doesn’t care about that. He doesn’t even live in Seattle. All his focus is on disassembling historic bridges so his big boat can get out of the harbor and shutting down Venice for his fancy celebrity wedding.

    I tell you what, if Bezos’ next penis-shaped rocket explodes with him aboard, scattering his component atoms across the mesosphere, I won’t be shedding any tears.

    ~ Ian

  • no kings day, santa cruz, march 28, 2025

    As an aside to this whole post, I’m going to say it was incredibly frustrating to see that the vast majority of protestors in Santa Cruz (about 90%) were boomers. Millennials and zoomers are the largest age demographic in the US, and we were extremely few and far between. It is pathetic to see older people willing to stand up and fight for the future of our country when the people who will inherit it show such unbelievable apathy. There are a bunch of criticisms of young people (or not that young anymore, in the case of older millennials) that are completely invalid, but it’s true that millennials believe that putting out a Twitter hashtag constitutes activism, and that zoomers will do whatever the influencers that their TikTok algorithm serves them will tell them to do.

    Nonviolent protests in Minneapolis got ICE to stand down and back off. In my city, the current mayor was elected by only a couple hundred votes. If I and a few hundred people decided not to vote that day, Seattle wouldn’t have our most progressive mayor in a generation.

    Cynicism is not wisdom, and memes are not action. My generation needs to learn that, because not caring will only end with us being crushed by oligarchs and techno-feudalists, and ensure that the future looks like a boot, stamping on a human face, forever.

  • mountain stars

    I’m in California right now, but I thought I’d check in. I was up in the mountains skiing for a little while, which was weird, because the highs were in the low seventies, so it was like skiing on Slurpees for most of the time. But even so, I had fun. It was typical spring skiing: guys in shorts, girls in bikinis, guys in Spider-Man costumes… the usual shenanigans. The only problem was that the weather was like what it is at the end of April, not the middle of March. So it goes!

    I tried to take some pictures of the stars while I was up there. I think they turned out pretty good! At least, they were pretty good for a basic iPhone camera.

    It’s nice to be able to see stars. Back home, the night sky is shrouded in clouds most nights and light pollution the rest of the time, so seeing some actual spacelights is a welcome treat

    Writing continues apace. I’m almost done with a draft of a novel. Gonna ship that out to beta readers soon and start querying it by this summer. I’ve also written a few short stories that I’m going to submit after revisions. My hope is that 2026 will be the Year When It Finally Happens™. Unfortunately, I wanted that about 2025, and while the Resnick award was cool, I’m still not a Publicated Authorist, as I call it. My fear is that I’m going to think that this year will be the Year When It Finally Happens™ until there are no years left. I don’t think that’s a writer thing, though. It’s a human thing.

  • Books I’m Enjoying, March 2026

    Been a while since we’ve done one of these, eh? It’s kind of hard to do a “Books I’m Enjoying” column when I haven’t been enjoying much of, well, anything. Even so, I’ve been reading, because books, art, and music are three of the only reasons to keep living in such a dehumanized world. Sorry to be a downer, but that’s just how it be sometimes. Anyhow, let’s get into the books!

    Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, Tad Williams

    Big book is big! This four-book fantasy trilogy came out in the late 80s/early 90s, and was hugely influential for its time, inspiring writers like George R.R. Martin and Patrick Rothfuss to write their own series with a heavier focus on psychological introspection and nuanced characters. I can understand how this series inspired them. Other series coming out at the same period like Wheel of Time and The Belgariad tend to have characters that might charitably be described as “archetypes” and more cruelly as “having the overall depth of puddles”. Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn has similar medieval European trappings as those other series, but even though the characters might appear on the surface to fall into the typical tropes of “orphaned boy with a destiny”, “beautiful, virtuous princess”, “wicked magic-using priest”, and “mysterious immortals with strange magical powers”, they possess a level of interiority that must have been a genuine shock at the time. You only have to look at the nuance of the relationship between Prince Josua and his consort Vorzheva to know that Williams was years ahead of his time. 

    A Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor Vinge

    I don’t characterize this as the greatest science fiction novel of all time. To my mind, that still has to be The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester. But A Fire Upon the Deep is pretty close. It has a galaxy where the laws of technology function different depending on what region you’re in, canine aliens with hive minds and a medieval level of technology, a mission to rescue two children stranded on a perilous world, and a mysterious alien intelligence that theatens the entire galaxy. It’s also fascinating to see this novel’s depiction of the internet. Most novels describing computer networks in the late 80s and early 90s focused on the ways that the internet would connect people and allow them to share ideas. The forum wars leading to actual genocide in this book seem much more akin to how social media has warped humanity in the 21st century. It’s not for nothing that Vinge characterizes the web as the “Net of a Million Lies”. 

    In Other Lands, Sarah Rees Brennan

    Sarah Rees Brennan wrote what might be my favorite fantasy novel in years, Long Live Evil, which was her adult debut. I’ve been working her way through her back catalog, including this splendid YA fantasy. It’s a portal fantasy similar to Harry Potter, but while Harry has all the personality of a plank of wood, In Other Lands’ protagonist Elliot is a snarky, charming asshole whose vast intelligence hides a great well of insecurity. Plus, there are plenty of queer characters; a fascinating, misandrist elven culture; and lots of Bisexual Yearning™. Brennan may just be one of my favorite current fantasy writers, along with Tamsin Muir, Holly Black, and V.E. Schwab. 

    Monolithic Undertow, Harry Sword

    This book is half musical history and half philosophical text exploring the permutations of what author Harry Sword refers to as “the drone”: that sustained, atonal, reverb-heavy hum that lies at the foundation of so much doom metal and post-rock. Monolithic Undertow covers all the genre’s greatest hits – Black Sabbath, Sleep, Electric Wizard, Melvins, Earth, Sunn 0))) – but expands his examination across genres and cultures, from Indian ragas and Moroccan folk music to the Velvet Underground and krautrock, all the way to the watery noises we hear in the womb and the sonic resonance of the cosmic microwave background. If you’re at all interested in experimental or heavy music, this book is a total mind-expander. 

    It’s nice to be able to talk about something good. Haruki Murakami pointed out in Novelist as a Vocation that only about five percent of the population are active, regular readers. But as long as we exist, there will always be books for us. 

    ~ Iann 0))) (listening to No Obligation by the Linda Lindas)

  • thoughts on being average

    Thought the First

    If we trace the Semitic languages as far back as we can, we can find out that the Proto-Semitic word for blindness was something like *ʕwr. This eventually got extended to mean “damage someone’s eye to make them blind”, and eventually, when it arrived in Arabic as ‘awār, meaning “damage” more generally.

    By the time *ʕwr became ‘awār, the Arabs were no longer desert nomads. This was the Islamic golden age, and ships of Arab sailors plowed the Mediterranean, trading with nations across Africa, Asia, and Europe. The Venetians and Genoese were especially close trading partners with the Arabs. They borrowed the word ‘awār as avaria, which, due to the maritime links with the Arabs, meant “damage to a ship’s cargo”.

    The word got borrowed into many different European languages, usually meaning something like “damage”. The word averría in Spanish, for example, means a mechanical failure in a car. But in English, after a detour through French as the word avarie and the addition of the suffix -age to bring it in line with words like damage, this word passed into maritime law as a method of determining the shared liability of cargo damaged or lost at sea. This financial liability would be apportioned by adding up the value of all damaged goods and dividing by the number of interested parties.

    By the 1600s, that word got used to refer more generally to taking the arithmetic mean in general, then, in the 1800s, to mean “typical” or “ordinary”, then, finally, to mean “unexceptional” or “middling in quality”. And that’s how we get the word average.

    From blindness to boring in five thousand years.

    Thought the Second

    Half of all people have two testicles. Half of all people have none.

    Half of all people have two ovaries. Half of all people have none.

    This means, mathematically speaking, the average person has one testicle and one ovary.

    Thought the Third

    Some people lose fingers or toes. Some people have their ears cut off. Some people have one or both eyes put out. Some people have their arms torn off or their limbs amputated.

    I have ten fingers, ten toes, two ears, two eyes, two arms, and two legs.

    I think, technically, that makes me above average.

  • they promise education but really they give you tests and scores

    This last few days has, unfortunately, been the cat vomit frosting upon the giant shit cake that 2026 has been so far. There has been a bit of turmoil in my personal life. Unfortunately, I got fired.

    I won’t go too far into the details, but the tl;dr is that there was a girl who was being a consistent bully. Every single day, she was consistently, deliberately cruel to other students, mainly a group of other girls, and – worse than that – an autistic first grader who had to be moved into another group because of her actions. The bullying took the form of insults, mockery, physical harassment, and, on two separate occasions, spitting on other students. Last week, I finally lost my temper at her and said some things that, perhaps, I shouldn’t have said. She told her mother, who is a teacher at the school where I worked. And because of that, I got let go.

    I accept full culpability on my part. I said things that were wrong, and I acknowledge it. But I cannot stand bullies, and especially those who enable them: which, I realize now, my after-school program was doing. Furthermore, they provided me with inadequate support to deal with the situation from either a disciplinary or emotional perspective, and then punished me for their lack of competency. I generally give people the benefit of the doubt. But by condoning this child’s harmful, antisocial behavior, I realize now that this job wasn’t worth my time.

    When I was growing up, I was conditioned by teachers and, especially, my in-classroom aide of ten years to expect bullying as my birthright. If I fought back, I was punished for acting out. If I reported other kids’ behavior, I was told off for tattling. The other kids, seeing that I was being punished for their actions, were emboldened. Eventually I bore it in silence, keeping my anger simmering on the inside like a pressure cooker with a faulty release valve, until it exploded outward.

    I don’t blame the other kids for their actions. Kids don’t have fully developed empathy, and honestly, they don’t entirely finish growing that part of their psyches until they’re in their early twenties. But I blame the authority figures around me, who should have seen that I was vulnerable, and instead of protecting me, just made me a target. Furthermore, whenever another student was nice or kind to me in any way, I was expected to treat it as an act of generosity on par with Mother Teresa. For my teachers and aide, bullying and cruelty were the default state of affairs, and even being deliberately ignored was considered a kindness.

    Ever since I left high school, I’ve arranged my life so as to avoid bullies. Now that I finally have a choice as to who I spend time with, I’ve cut off contact with any of the teachers who enabled my bullies, as well as other toxic influences in my life – arrogant bosses, narcissistic roommates, manipulative and judgmental former friends. I survived school. I’m done with it.

    I believe I’m done working in education for a while. I don’t want to be a part of a system that punishes those who stand up to bullies while, at the same time, rewarding the arrogance and cruelty of those same bullies. As the death stick merchant in Attack of the Clones said, I need to go home and rethink my life. As that nice Mr. Vonnegut said, so it goes.

    ~ Ian (currently listening to The Silver Cord by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard)

  • portrait by goblins

    My students (who I affectionately refer to as “the goblins”) decided to draw a couple of portraits of me today. I thought they were fantastic, and with my supervisor’s permission (and the identifying information of the goblins in question removed), I decided to share them with you. Here they are!

    I think I want these as my official author photos someday!

    ~ Ian (Mr. Ian in Goblin)

  • lights in the winter darkness

    When I first moved to Seattle, it snowed a few days every winter. Not a lot, only a few inches, but the city shut down because of it. For some reason, Seattleites are unable to handle the smallest number of flakes, and grocery stores would be stripped bare, as if an apocalypse was at hand.

    It hasn’t snowed this winter.

    I don’t know if that’s just an anomaly or if that’s going to be the pattern going forward. The climate is fucked. I don’t know if it’s irrevocably fucked, but the people in power show no interest in un-fucking it. Maybe within my lifetime, snow in Seattle will be a distant memory.

    Perhaps more distressing, I’ve heard that, due to climactic changes, it will be impossible to grow coffee at large scales within a few decades. Coffee needs a very specific biome to grow in, and that biome will very soon be gone. This has vast implications for Seattle far beyond not having snow. What are we supposed to do if we don’t have coffee? Go to a cafe and pop an Excedrin?

    Change is the constant of the universe. That doesn’t mean all change is good, unfortunately.

    ~ Ian (listening to Wasting Light by Foo Fighters)

  • talk to me like humans do

    My friend and fellow Resnick Award nominee Jason Boyd sent me this Penny Arcade comic from a few days ago:

    Screenshot

    That last panel… woof.

    (As a side note, I’ve actually met Jerry Holkins in person. I think that if you spend enough time in tabletop gaming stores in Seattle he will just make himself manifest. As I recall, he was buying Age of Sigmar figurines.)

    Aside from the perils posed by the other issue discussed in that last panel (I speak as someone who has, on occasion, consumed a wee bit too much of humanity’s favorite recreational hydrocarbon), there’s a lot to be said about the act of “creation” under AI that I still have a lot of thoughts about. As far as I can tell, the proponents of AI-based “writing” tools seem to have this belief that the reason writers write is to have a salable produce at the end of it – that the point of writing is to have written. In this worldview, books and stories are entirely fungible, and the act of creation is a burdensome chore. Think of how much time you’ll have, they imply, now that the boring writing part is out of the way!

    I think that, all things considered, if I had more time to write, I would probably spend that time writing.

    Perhaps I should view this narrow, ultracapitalist view of artists and creation as sad, or reprehensible. But I mostly find it confusing. For people who make tools that are ostensibly intended to help artists, I wonder if these tech bro AI proponents have actually ever interacted with an artist in any meaningful way. Or, perhaps, do they only socialize with other brogrammers in their spare time, and their worldview is so warped by that tiny echo chamber?

    This is largely the same reason why I don’t argue with fundamentalist Christians. Not because I think that they’re right, but because it would be impossible. The parameters by which our worldviews operate are so fundamentally different that communication couldn’t exist between us. In order for a discourse to occur, there has to be some kind of consensual reality that we can use as a basis. Otherwise, it would be like trying to discuss which pizza topping is best, only to learn halfway through an increasingly heated argument that when your interlocutor says pizza, they mean small cherrywood box filled with decorative painted thimbles from the Scandinavian region. There is an inherent incompatibility that becomes impossible to overcome.

    If you see nothing fundamentally different between a book written by a human and a hundred thousand words of Markov-chain generated text, maybe AI writing tools are a good idea to you. I suppose they both contain letters and words, and can be held in a .doc file. But if that’s the case, then you must genuinely believe that there is no difference between a human and a Markov-chain computer program, and when you’ve reached that point, our universal parameters are so contradictory that communication between us is impossible.

    ~ Ian (listening to Spine by Myrkur)