lesser daemon: brent bailey's personal weblog

20

Feb

Live Forever As A Time Worm

Or how I learned to stop worrying and hate Interstellar

Originally given as a talk at MindSwap #4, 2/7/2026.

Ever since I was young I have been obsessed with time's arrow. This is in large part because as soon as I became aware of the possibility of eternal death - around age 8, if I remember correctly - I have been consumed by both terror and the desire to outwit it. The strategies most commonly recommended to me are to "make peace with it" or "find god", but neither has proved particularly effective.

So to conquer my fear

7 min read

30

Jan

January Update/Links/Screenshots

After averaging 9 posts a month last year, I have gotten off to a slow start this year. Mostly this is because, at least for right now, I have no daily project to write about. One of my takeaways from writing at such a frenetic pace last year was that it would be nice to actually take my time drafting and editing things. I have been doing this, but it's a bit of a monkey's paw: when I don't just immediately hit "publish" after writing something I often end up either deciding it was a bad idea or making tweaks

4 min read

12

Dec

2025, Wrapped

I have made several stabs at writing this post this week, none of which really felt like they stuck the landing. It is very hard to cleanly capture a year that contained both my marriage and my mom's death. Some days I have felt better than I have in years, some days like I will never see sunlight again. Focusing on one or the other side of it feels like an incomplete picture, but writing an essay about how sad I am that's also about how happy I am doesn't really mesh tonally. So: it's been a hell of a

3 min read

08

Nov

Lotus Farming In Another World

Like many people who live in cities and spend most of their time on the computer, I fantasize a lot about leaving it all behind and touching grass forever. I try my best to be cognizant of just how much of a fantasy this is: I find it easy to get bored in the biggest city in America, so I'd probably go insane within days of moving out to a farm somewhere. Boredom aside, there is a reason manual labor is something people often try to escape, and that the ability to do it in a leisurely fashion is mostly

7 min read

05

Nov

30 days of atproto: hope for an open future

It's a beautiful day here in New York. Zohran Mamdani was elected on a message of hope and change (and significantly more concrete change than the last time something similar happened). This is also the final day of my 30 days of atproto project, which works out thematically quite well. I have a lot of hope for atproto, and while there's a lot of work in front of us (just as there is for the mayor-elect), I am thrilled at the prospect of building something that felt impossible a few years ago, a sea change for how we think about

4 min read