About

A systems engineer's exploration of technology, meaning, creativity, and modern complexity. I write, build, and direct from the same desk: AI-assisted engineering by day, films and music and books by night, philosophy and freewriting underneath all of it.

The thread running through all of it is what I call coherent complexity: making a complex system legible enough to live inside, without pretending it is simple. I think of myself as a domain cartographer. I go into a complicated territory, chart it, and leave a trail others can follow. Lately I have been giving that instinct a firmer name and a harder test: complexence is the human capability underneath it, the capacity to stand inside a complex system without coming apart, and the science of complexence is the open research program I am building to find out whether it can be measured at all. That one idea is applied across a small constellation of frameworks, each a map of one domain: People of the Stars for time, Situational Governance for power, Hansuru for the self and uncertainty, Napkin Films for creative work, and the Decan Log for the daily practice that grounds it all. The newest two are a game and a lab: 7helm, a live multiplayer game built in the open as a working model of a system under load, and Fidelitron, which asks how small a model of a system can get before it stops telling the truth. Under all of it, this year, a slow read through the cybernetics canon, the field that named the steersman. I am learning it in the open and leaving my maps along the way: a family tree of the field, the papers in order with a primer for each, and the shelf I study from, so someone else can walk the same ground.

Author of AgentSpek, The Decan Log and The Little Black Book of Hansuru. Director of Napkin Films, an animated short film studio made entirely from code. I run Organic Arts LLC, a Nevada company focused on technical publishing, creative engineering, and building at the AI frontier.

What I do professionally: Director-level DevOps leadership, cloud architecture, AWS infrastructure at scale, 15+ years building distributed systems. The kind of work where you're three levels of abstraction above the code and still responsible when it breaks.

Where I came from: The comparative history of ideas, at the University of Washington. It is why I walk into every new field through its history and its people before its formalism, and why the same pattern keeps turning up for me in physics, markets, code and a notebook.

What I do here: Write about AI-assisted engineering, agent workflows, systems thinking, and the stranger edges of building at the frontier. Also: book reviews, field notes, and long essays that don't fit anywhere else.

Projects you might care about:

• AgentSpek, my book on working with AI agents. Practical, not hype. Available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback.
• The Decan Log, a book on the 10-day decanal calendar and conscious living. Available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.
• The Little Black Book of Hansuru, a field manual on antifragile investing, the operating system for uncertainty behind the Hansuru framework. Available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback.
• Napkin Films, AI-directed animated films. Stick figures, chip-tune scores, all made from code. Subscribe on YouTube or browse all the films.
• 7helm, a live multiplayer game, online co-op for up to four, with its server, site and release pipeline in one repo. How it is made.
• ChipForge, my chip-tune music synthesis engine that scores every Napkin Film. Built from scratch in Python and numpy.
• Napkin Films Soundtracks on Bandcamp. The scores stand on their own. First album: Plan 9, Napkin Films, Vol. 1.

---

There is something about writing by hand that I keep coming back to. The way ink flows from pen to page, how thoughts pour out when I stop trying to control them. Stephen King writes about this in On Writing. The act of putting words down becomes its own form of discovery. That is exactly how it has always worked for me.

This practice of freewriting, of mining the subconscious, is the center of everything here.

I started without a map. Just notebooks and the compulsion to record whatever was drifting below the surface, waiting to make its way out. Handwritten journals translated into digital form, reflections that became essays, a life examined one page at a time.

---

What Lives Here

Essays on technology and consciousness, AI development, philosophy. What it means to be alive in a moment when machines are learning to think alongside us. Carl Sagan's The Dragons of Eden shaped how I think about intelligence and what makes us human.

The Library of reviews on the books that changed how I see things:

• Philosophy & Meaning: The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, The Stranger by Albert Camus, Peace in Every Breath by Thich Nhat Hanh
• Cosmic Perspective: Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan. The one that remapped everything.
• Writing & Creativity: Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, On Writing by Stephen King, Gertrude Stein on Writing
• Technology: Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Insanely Great on the Macintosh revolution
• Fiction & Adventure: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, Pink Boots and a Machete

If a book changed me, I wrote about it. Browse them all

Complexity and systems, the thread the essays hang from: Making Complexity Visible, Complexence, Domain Cartography, and the cybernetics reading path. Every page here belongs to one of six topics, and each topic page says where to start.

Freewriting sessions where the pen makes its own journey. Raw, unfiltered, sometimes strange.

Journals tracking the decanal cycles. Ten days at a time, watching what shifts.

AgentSpek is my book on working with AI. It's available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback, with the opening chapters free to read here.

Napkin Films is an animated short film studio I run. AI-directed stick-figure animation. Chip-tune scores synthesized from numpy arrays. Short, strange, made entirely from code. Browse all the films, subscribe on YouTube, or listen to the soundtracks on Bandcamp.

There is more on the Projects page.

Some of it will be for you. Some won't. I write to find out what I think, not to tell you what to think.

---

This site is independently run. No ads, no paywalls, no investors. Everything here is self-funded on a shoestring. If something has been useful to you, buying a book through one of the links here costs you nothing extra and keeps this going. That's all I ask.

Joshua