Content note: this is part of a challenge of writing a blogpost per day for a week.
Epistemic status: this is a series of vignettes written as-though diary entries. While substantially grounded in specific and real experiences, the writing ended up being more impressionistic and inaccurate in places; I was more interested in the writing style so I didn't take the time to fix it. Importantly the chronology and especially some of the vaguer events are not real.
[Friday] Today I find myself walking with the groundskeeper, Hogan. He is an older gentleman, skin bronzed by years in the sun, fingers calloused by the carrying of stones and the digging in soil. He lives a slower life than the rest of us, the impact of his work felt over seasons rather than hours, and his conversation too carries at the slowest pace of any man or woman I have course to speak with in life. He is knowledgeable about the plants that grow throughout our plot of land, he can quickly tell me which plants will grow back and which ones are lost causes. Like many of the plants, he himself is under-maintained, and I only tend to spend time giving input on his work if something has gone wrong. But each year before the Festival Season, I walk the grounds with him and we discuss what should be tended to, what should be cut back, which walkways want to be clearer, which weeds should be removed, and I give him double his salary for two weeks to hire a helper for the increased workload. Something of a Summer cleaning.
This last year a catastrophe struck, as he climbed up into one of our two Brugmansia, the one in the center of campus, to trim it. While it looks like a tree and can hold itself up with its bark, the Royal Horticultural Society describes it as a vigorous large shrub. Well, the bark did not survive his weight, and split in two, half the tree falling down on the ground dead, and the other half the worse the wear for it. It survives now in a diminished form, but I doubt it will last the year. He took some time to recover emotionally from the error, although I don't particularly hold it against him, the Brugmansia had always seemed and felt strong in the past to me.
The trim of the plants and foliage in the gardens and along the paths by the Bayes Cabins are quite picturesque, and I am impressed how quickly it all came together.
[Saturday] Lighthaven rises at 8am today, due to an early sound check in the park. My sleeping quarters are high up in the center of the land, with many large windows, meaning that all manner of light and sound invade each day. One learns to have ready ear plugs, eye masks, and over-ear headphones playing white-noise if one wishes to sleep-in much later than that in the early morning.
The daily swarm arrives. These people are dressed more fancily than the usual crowds, both more formal and more flirty, the skinny women's suits showing their midriffs, the men's cashmere sweaters and functionless patterned hats color-coordinated. They are purportedly here to answer critical questions for humanity, but after spotting three or four known lunatics and sociopaths, I suspect their standards for thought are low, as long as one can find some way to get attention.
For the most part, however, the people can tell they are in a place worth caring for. They do not damage the furniture, they do not speak rudely to the staff. This is an oasis they are grateful to be able to drink from while making connections with people.
The place surrounding this plot of land is dirty, poor, graffitied, smelly, closed-down, and ramshackle. This plot of land was too when it first became Lighthaven, but the mold has been excised via burning ritual and the shabbiness replaced with newer woods, in spite of (and in order to spite) the local eyes of Moloch.
And the people who pass through are rejuvenated by this place that is much more alive than it has any right to be, given how the hands and eyes of Moloch have sucked the life from all around it.
[Sunday] Today I crossed the Bay Bridge. My friend is moving house, and must downsize their extraordinary library. Over the course of the day I select over a hundred books that they have subsequently donated to the Lighthaven Library. In return I buy Mexican food for our lunch.
[Monday] We have finally found a solution to two problems at once.
At the front of Lighthaven is a noisy main street, so the area just inside is typically vacant. We store excess furniture there. One such piece of furniture, a dark-wood open-walled wicker cube with a bed of cream cushions to lay in, has sat there a long time. It is rarely wanted in our outdoor lecture spaces or common spaces as it takes too much space.
In the farthest corner of the gardens, there is a wooden deck built on the whim of Commander Lagerros. While an appealing hide away, the tree that reaches over it is filled with inedible red berries that fall on any furniture below it, rendering it unsittable in hours and permanently spoiling the cushions in a week.
The maintenance and improvement of the Lighthaven campus is most commonly done in hidden moments, on the side of more important things, out of a deep desire for beautiful layout or by event organizers whose taste in spaces cannot be fully reined in. These two problems have persisted for many years, and yet only today did it occur to me that by moving the wicker cube into the farthest corner, and sealing the roof over it, could we make the beautiful hidden nook that I write to you from now.
The rest of the day is spent organizing the outdoor furniture to make the space more delightful, as part of what I have internally named "Project Delighthaven", for which I have an army of contractors by the names of Aldern, Gar, Hubbard, Demirian, Fox, Brodski, Crossman, Hogan, etc. etc.
[Tuesday] There have been two delivery crises in the course of preparing for the upcoming Festival Season.
The first was not so much of a crisis, but it did require us to find ways to move faster than is standard.
A key issue with our campus last Festival Season was the maximum capacity. Many spaces were overcrowded, and people reported a lot of noise and overwhelm.
There are two prongs to this: firstly, to have fewer people. I made attempts to increase prices more aggressively and eventually cap the total sales, but the former was ineffective and the latter failed (my poor communications around it led to an outcry, as people from foreign countries who had planned work vacations had not realized it was happening and could not buy tickets, leading me to open the sales once more).
The second is to have more space. How can one make more space without developing or extending the land? By changing the utilization. Two shared bedrooms have been sacrificed for session spaces, and the normally quiet Drethelin Gardens will have new seating added throughout. For each new space I took Aldern, Gar, Hubbard and Demirian; we cannibalized furniture from elsewhere to try different layouts, until we settled on what each nook wanted. By this process, we determined that we could accept the following:
After consulting many alternatives with Aldern, we ended up returning to the source of much of our existing furniture, Article.com, and placing an order. Knowing that we didn't have much time, I immediately phoned them to see how I could expedite delivery.
I learned that they would ship the furniture quickly to a warehouse in California, but the delivery from that warehouse could be as late as two weeks after Festival Season began. I phoned the warehouse and then back to Article, and negotiated getting my own truck to drive to the warehouse the next business day to do pick up ourselves. That truck was turned away on day one (the warehouse claimed they hadn't been given enough notice) but on day two the furniture was loaded and brought to Lighthaven, where that same crew of 4 spent a day unboxing, affixing, and transplanting the furniture.
The second delivery crisis was when, on Thursday morning, the company producing name tags called Crossman to check if it was okay that they not be delivered early Friday, but instead Saturday afternoon. We explained that between five and seven hundred people would be arriving on Friday and so this was not okay.
I kept phoning back asking for updates from their production team about how we could expedite it. On my third call he said that they couldn't work faster, and I asked if that would change if I paid them $1,000 or $2,000. He quickly said that he'd have to ask his manager and hung up on me. I was concerned that this was him writing me off as a crazy person harassing him, but when I called back 20 minutes later he said that they would be able to get it done that night, and even made an offer to drive them up to Berkeley at no extra charge (which seemed bizarre to me and I declined). An Inkhaven Resident by the name of Prasad was already set to drive up from Los Angeles and lived a mere 12 minutes drive from the warehouse, so he collected the bounty and brought them up on time.
[Wednesday] The people here have, amongst them, read every great work by the likes of Yudkowsky, Branwen, Alexander, Mowshowitz, Salamon, etc. etc., yet this does not protect them from the most unbounded of distortions and biases, nor does it ward off the liars, charlatans and frauds.
Today we got word that we lost another friend to the dark forces of corruption. Some who fall are not so surprising, they never seemed to be especially strong of mind and character. Others seem strong of both and it's a terrible loss to see them fall.
This is a land where people once came to save the world. Now many who pass through work to end it. The corrupting power of money and industry has shown the weak moral backbone of most who profess otherwise. The forces that corrupt a man get their tendrils in many ways.
[Thursday] The Fox has returned. The air in the grounds will grow cooler from this point onwards.
[Friday] I rise at dawn, and after working in bed for three hours, move and camp out in Feynman House for the next eight hours.
For most of our four years on this plot of land, we've worked outdoors from a covered deck in the center of campus, able to see everything: who is coming and going, the effects of the wind and the rain, the hummingbirds as they visit our flowers, the building materials that are carried to where construction is happening, and so on. Not only are we in contact with the goings on, but we are readily accessible to staffers and event organizers and attendees with questions.
But during the month of Inkhaven, we wanted to give this central node of campus to the residents, so we retreated to the Feynman house in the gardens.
Feynman isn't part of the same property, just a neighboring residential house owned by the same person, which we acquired as well. Whereas the main buildings feel more modern, the garden building does not. Back when we bought the building it was being used to grow marijuana (and possibly more), and the exterior had piles of trash, decaying furniture, and scribbled drawings of scary faces. Two seemingly-homeless men were often in and out of it, and one of my teammates followed them back to an abandoned school bus they appeared to be sleeping in.
The house's staircase is made of an ugly concrete, the exterior wall has disintegrating paint, the windows are covered in cobwebs, the kitchen has a loose, disconnected piece of kitchen counter off to the side, the doors do not fit flush with their frames, the lighting is dingy, the toilet is scratched and rusted, etc. etc.
We've since made steps to improve the place. We've brought in some nicer furniture, and the weed-room (which was missing most of the wall and ceiling panels) has had the walls, ceiling and floor nicely refurbished, and the leaks in the ceiling fixed. The holes in the wall above the sink have been covered by cute wooden hangings. We've added a dentist's monitor arm with a bright Apple screen that can play music and be worked from. We've renovated the lawn into beautiful gardens that you can see through the five-foot square window, and the sunlight makes everything much more pleasant during the day. But still, the old building shines through our patches, and sometimes the dingey-ness is more present than the sunlight.
While I am camped here, various people on projects come to visit. Young, Miles, Bloom, Crossman, Ku, Jiang, etc. etc. With Young I speak of their status as a new immigrant, and their plans for hosting talks and debates during the Festival.
[Monday] My role in the Festival Season is behind me now. It went well enough, but I am putting together much grander plans for next year. It was good to catch up with many writers, including Newman, Matuschak, Nielsen, Ray, Chen, Troesh, Bjartur, Prasad, and more. This is also the first year I feel I have figured out how to bring a team around me that I trust to make the event better, and this fills me with hope for it being less taxing to run in the future.
But I have been burning out since April, so while I continue to live here right now I am not working (all the while I continue to see my teammates and contractors running around tending to the subsequent events). Soon I will gather my things and fly to the Netherlands to see my Father, then spend two weeks in England seeing my Mother and getting my visa updated by the US Consulate in London. I am yet to make plans for my time there.
I did not like England as a child, and these days treat it as a bad dream I have since awoken from; but after five years apart I am hopeful I will be able to see her in a new light.
Content note: this is part of a challenge of writing a blogpost per day for a week.
Epistemic status: this is a series of vignettes written as-though diary entries. While substantially grounded in specific and real experiences, the writing ended up being more impressionistic and inaccurate in places; I was more interested in the writing style so I didn't take the time to fix it. Importantly the chronology and especially some of the vaguer events are not real.
[Friday] Today I find myself walking with the groundskeeper, Hogan. He is an older gentleman, skin bronzed by years in the sun, fingers calloused by the carrying of stones and the digging in soil. He lives a slower life than the rest of us, the impact of his work felt over seasons rather than hours, and his conversation too carries at the slowest pace of any man or woman I have course to speak with in life. He is knowledgeable about the plants that grow throughout our plot of land, he can quickly tell me which plants will grow back and which ones are lost causes. Like many of the plants, he himself is under-maintained, and I only tend to spend time giving input on his work if something has gone wrong. But each year before the Festival Season, I walk the grounds with him and we discuss what should be tended to, what should be cut back, which walkways want to be clearer, which weeds should be removed, and I give him double his salary for two weeks to hire a helper for the increased workload. Something of a Summer cleaning.
This last year a catastrophe struck, as he climbed up into one of our two Brugmansia, the one in the center of campus, to trim it. While it looks like a tree and can hold itself up with its bark, the Royal Horticultural Society describes it as a vigorous large shrub. Well, the bark did not survive his weight, and split in two, half the tree falling down on the ground dead, and the other half the worse the wear for it. It survives now in a diminished form, but I doubt it will last the year. He took some time to recover emotionally from the error, although I don't particularly hold it against him, the Brugmansia had always seemed and felt strong in the past to me.
The trim of the plants and foliage in the gardens and along the paths by the Bayes Cabins are quite picturesque, and I am impressed how quickly it all came together.
[Saturday] Lighthaven rises at 8am today, due to an early sound check in the park. My sleeping quarters are high up in the center of the land, with many large windows, meaning that all manner of light and sound invade each day. One learns to have ready ear plugs, eye masks, and over-ear headphones playing white-noise if one wishes to sleep-in much later than that in the early morning.
The daily swarm arrives. These people are dressed more fancily than the usual crowds, both more formal and more flirty, the skinny women's suits showing their midriffs, the men's cashmere sweaters and functionless patterned hats color-coordinated. They are purportedly here to answer critical questions for humanity, but after spotting three or four known lunatics and sociopaths, I suspect their standards for thought are low, as long as one can find some way to get attention.
For the most part, however, the people can tell they are in a place worth caring for. They do not damage the furniture, they do not speak rudely to the staff. This is an oasis they are grateful to be able to drink from while making connections with people.
The place surrounding this plot of land is dirty, poor, graffitied, smelly, closed-down, and ramshackle. This plot of land was too when it first became Lighthaven, but the mold has been excised via burning ritual and the shabbiness replaced with newer woods, in spite of (and in order to spite) the local eyes of Moloch.
And the people who pass through are rejuvenated by this place that is much more alive than it has any right to be, given how the hands and eyes of Moloch have sucked the life from all around it.
[Sunday] Today I crossed the Bay Bridge. My friend is moving house, and must downsize their extraordinary library. Over the course of the day I select over a hundred books that they have subsequently donated to the Lighthaven Library. In return I buy Mexican food for our lunch.
[Monday] We have finally found a solution to two problems at once.
At the front of Lighthaven is a noisy main street, so the area just inside is typically vacant. We store excess furniture there. One such piece of furniture, a dark-wood open-walled wicker cube with a bed of cream cushions to lay in, has sat there a long time. It is rarely wanted in our outdoor lecture spaces or common spaces as it takes too much space.
In the farthest corner of the gardens, there is a wooden deck built on the whim of Commander Lagerros. While an appealing hide away, the tree that reaches over it is filled with inedible red berries that fall on any furniture below it, rendering it unsittable in hours and permanently spoiling the cushions in a week.
The maintenance and improvement of the Lighthaven campus is most commonly done in hidden moments, on the side of more important things, out of a deep desire for beautiful layout or by event organizers whose taste in spaces cannot be fully reined in. These two problems have persisted for many years, and yet only today did it occur to me that by moving the wicker cube into the farthest corner, and sealing the roof over it, could we make the beautiful hidden nook that I write to you from now.
The rest of the day is spent organizing the outdoor furniture to make the space more delightful, as part of what I have internally named "Project Delighthaven", for which I have an army of contractors by the names of Aldern, Gar, Hubbard, Demirian, Fox, Brodski, Crossman, Hogan, etc. etc.
[Tuesday] There have been two delivery crises in the course of preparing for the upcoming Festival Season.
The first was not so much of a crisis, but it did require us to find ways to move faster than is standard.
A key issue with our campus last Festival Season was the maximum capacity. Many spaces were overcrowded, and people reported a lot of noise and overwhelm.
There are two prongs to this: firstly, to have fewer people. I made attempts to increase prices more aggressively and eventually cap the total sales, but the former was ineffective and the latter failed (my poor communications around it led to an outcry, as people from foreign countries who had planned work vacations had not realized it was happening and could not buy tickets, leading me to open the sales once more).
The second is to have more space. How can one make more space without developing or extending the land? By changing the utilization. Two shared bedrooms have been sacrificed for session spaces, and the normally quiet Drethelin Gardens will have new seating added throughout. For each new space I took Aldern, Gar, Hubbard and Demirian; we cannibalized furniture from elsewhere to try different layouts, until we settled on what each nook wanted. By this process, we determined that we could accept the following:
After consulting many alternatives with Aldern, we ended up returning to the source of much of our existing furniture, Article.com, and placing an order. Knowing that we didn't have much time, I immediately phoned them to see how I could expedite delivery.
I learned that they would ship the furniture quickly to a warehouse in California, but the delivery from that warehouse could be as late as two weeks after Festival Season began. I phoned the warehouse and then back to Article, and negotiated getting my own truck to drive to the warehouse the next business day to do pick up ourselves. That truck was turned away on day one (the warehouse claimed they hadn't been given enough notice) but on day two the furniture was loaded and brought to Lighthaven, where that same crew of 4 spent a day unboxing, affixing, and transplanting the furniture.
The second delivery crisis was when, on Thursday morning, the company producing name tags called Crossman to check if it was okay that they not be delivered early Friday, but instead Saturday afternoon. We explained that between five and seven hundred people would be arriving on Friday and so this was not okay.
I kept phoning back asking for updates from their production team about how we could expedite it. On my third call he said that they couldn't work faster, and I asked if that would change if I paid them $1,000 or $2,000. He quickly said that he'd have to ask his manager and hung up on me. I was concerned that this was him writing me off as a crazy person harassing him, but when I called back 20 minutes later he said that they would be able to get it done that night, and even made an offer to drive them up to Berkeley at no extra charge (which seemed bizarre to me and I declined). An Inkhaven Resident by the name of Prasad was already set to drive up from Los Angeles and lived a mere 12 minutes drive from the warehouse, so he collected the bounty and brought them up on time.
[Wednesday] The people here have, amongst them, read every great work by the likes of Yudkowsky, Branwen, Alexander, Mowshowitz, Salamon, etc. etc., yet this does not protect them from the most unbounded of distortions and biases, nor does it ward off the liars, charlatans and frauds.
Today we got word that we lost another friend to the dark forces of corruption. Some who fall are not so surprising, they never seemed to be especially strong of mind and character. Others seem strong of both and it's a terrible loss to see them fall.
This is a land where people once came to save the world. Now many who pass through work to end it. The corrupting power of money and industry has shown the weak moral backbone of most who profess otherwise. The forces that corrupt a man get their tendrils in many ways.
[Thursday] The Fox has returned. The air in the grounds will grow cooler from this point onwards.
[Friday] I rise at dawn, and after working in bed for three hours, move and camp out in Feynman House for the next eight hours.
For most of our four years on this plot of land, we've worked outdoors from a covered deck in the center of campus, able to see everything: who is coming and going, the effects of the wind and the rain, the hummingbirds as they visit our flowers, the building materials that are carried to where construction is happening, and so on. Not only are we in contact with the goings on, but we are readily accessible to staffers and event organizers and attendees with questions.
But during the month of Inkhaven, we wanted to give this central node of campus to the residents, so we retreated to the Feynman house in the gardens.
Feynman isn't part of the same property, just a neighboring residential house owned by the same person, which we acquired as well. Whereas the main buildings feel more modern, the garden building does not. Back when we bought the building it was being used to grow marijuana (and possibly more), and the exterior had piles of trash, decaying furniture, and scribbled drawings of scary faces. Two seemingly-homeless men were often in and out of it, and one of my teammates followed them back to an abandoned school bus they appeared to be sleeping in.
The house's staircase is made of an ugly concrete, the exterior wall has disintegrating paint, the windows are covered in cobwebs, the kitchen has a loose, disconnected piece of kitchen counter off to the side, the doors do not fit flush with their frames, the lighting is dingy, the toilet is scratched and rusted, etc. etc.
We've since made steps to improve the place. We've brought in some nicer furniture, and the weed-room (which was missing most of the wall and ceiling panels) has had the walls, ceiling and floor nicely refurbished, and the leaks in the ceiling fixed. The holes in the wall above the sink have been covered by cute wooden hangings. We've added a dentist's monitor arm with a bright Apple screen that can play music and be worked from. We've renovated the lawn into beautiful gardens that you can see through the five-foot square window, and the sunlight makes everything much more pleasant during the day. But still, the old building shines through our patches, and sometimes the dingey-ness is more present than the sunlight.
While I am camped here, various people on projects come to visit. Young, Miles, Bloom, Crossman, Ku, Jiang, etc. etc. With Young I speak of their status as a new immigrant, and their plans for hosting talks and debates during the Festival.
[Monday] My role in the Festival Season is behind me now. It went well enough, but I am putting together much grander plans for next year. It was good to catch up with many writers, including Newman, Matuschak, Nielsen, Ray, Chen, Troesh, Bjartur, Prasad, and more. This is also the first year I feel I have figured out how to bring a team around me that I trust to make the event better, and this fills me with hope for it being less taxing to run in the future.
But I have been burning out since April, so while I continue to live here right now I am not working (all the while I continue to see my teammates and contractors running around tending to the subsequent events). Soon I will gather my things and fly to the Netherlands to see my Father, then spend two weeks in England seeing my Mother and getting my visa updated by the US Consulate in London. I am yet to make plans for my time there.
I did not like England as a child, and these days treat it as a bad dream I have since awoken from; but after five years apart I am hopeful I will be able to see her in a new light.
Inspired by (and with one or two lines plagiarized from) "At the Extremity of Civilization"; A Meticulously Descriptive Diary of an Illinois Physician's Journey [to California] in 1849