Outro s2 E11
Hello and welcome back to the apocalypse my survivor compatriots.
H
ow we doing?
It occurs to me that many of you might be binge listening your way through the episodes. And you might be sick of hearing my voice at the end of the episode every ½ hour or so!
I get it, I listen to a lot of podcasts. Right now, I’m binge listening through a history of the American Civil War.
It’s always a bit funny, in an anachronistic way, to hear the hosts talking worriedly about something that happened 2-3 years ago.
Or, when they apologize for being late with an episode because of some life event, and your like, ‘nope, wasn’t late at all…’
Anyhow, for you time travelers from the future, this week is the 3rd week of January 2022. I’d tell you about the current world events, but by the time you’re listening to this you won’t care, it will be in the past.
Even events that seem awful and impactful to us will have faded to just another footnote in history when you get here.
Tying this back into our story here; even an apocalyptic event would eventually fade into the day-to-day cares of humanity, if any survived. Humans are like cockroaches, if you don’t get us all you’ll have your infestation back in no time at all.
This week we introduced a new character, John Tasker. He represents one of those ‘centers of gravity’ in the story line. Not him so much personally, but what he embodies.
Also, hopefully all you Southeast Tennesseans will forgive Robert’s attempt at an accent and my attempt at writing in the vernacular. I know how much I cringe when I listen to an actor trying to do a Boston accent.
But – Let’s talk about Algorithms. Civilizations are built by algorithms.
What do these people and these communities that we are discovering in our story represent?
The apocalypse is filled with struggle and tension. Not just within individuals for the salvation of their souls, so to speak, but within the remaining and evolving communities that each contend to build, or recover. Each is a unique vision of the future. How does one evolve and thrive and others don’t?
I’m going to get nerdy here.
It’s not just good versus evil. That is too simple. It’s the dynamic between different centers of gravity that will define the emerging or recovering modalities.
It’s not chaos or chance.
There is a pattern to it.
It’s an algorithm, from a class of algorithms known as genetic algorithms.
That algorithm is seeded, or started with, different assumptions and constraints for each. Then as the algorithm churns each outcome is impacted by events.
These algorithms are not random. Even chaos settles into observable patterns over a long enough horizon. The emergence or re-emergence of civilization has a pattern.
It evolves.
The three things that determine that evolution are first, the seed. What is the starting point? Second it the mutation rate. What changes? What events intercede that force adaptation? And finally, most importantly, what is the goal, or forgive me for using the technical term, the ‘fitness criteria’?
The Seed and the Fitness Criteria are determined by us. The mutation rate is determined by the environment.
Early evolutions or generations of the algorithm will produce deterministic and authoritarian communities because the fitness criteria is simply to survive and stay fed.
Later generations will evolve beyond that, hopefully.
Which gives us an opportunity to shut the nerd speak off with a quote from one of my fellow Massachusettians, John Quincy Adams,
“I have to study politics and war so that my sons can study mathematics, commerce and agriculture, so their sons can study poetry, painting and music.”
…
We’ve got 90 members in our Facebook group as of this morning. We’re talking about good locations to base an apocalypse story. Joe said Puerto Rico and I had a hilarious image pop into my mind of a pirates of the Caribbean – Jimmy Buffet zombie mashup.
We’re running at around 11,000 downloads a month.
Still haven’t won the lottery or received a call from Hollywood. I will continue to push out a show every two weeks. I’m just about maxed out in terms of available time and it appears I’m going to be taking on a new role at work that will require a bandwidth adjustment!
To be honest with you, looking at the progress we’re making on the Season 2 story arc, we may end up going over 20 episodes, but that’s ok.
It’s a new year, so do us a favor and go like and review so the algorithms are happy. We don’t want the algorithms to turn malevolent on us.
Links to the show and the Facebook group etc in the show notes.
BTW, for those of you who may be less podcast savvy, what that means is that there is text associated with the mp3 file that you are listening to right now. There is an option in the app you’re listening with to ‘show notes’ – if you do that, you’ll find these comments and the links.
There’s also a Patreon page that I have been meaning to update where you can give me some shekels to keep the lights on a Apocalypse HQ.
And… This just in…I told you before that converted the edited manuscript from season one into an Amazon Vella serial. I’ve been posting an episode, the written version of the episodes, each week. I haven’t been paying much attention to it, but I got an email from Amazon today that said I made money in December.
So there you go! I’ll put that link here as well.
And finally we have our apfter the apocalypse store on TeePublic where you can get yourself a sticker for your car that everyone in your neighborhood will be jealous of.
Enjoy your week, spring is coming, the days are getting longer, (at least on my side of the planet) and Keep surviving.
Comments