Book one · a chapbook · 25 March 2009
A Funny Thing Is
Seven early poems about desire, childhood shame, family myth and watching a father grow old. A mouth becomes a cave, a seatbelt digs in, and a sheltering tree turns to glass.
Fig. 1. The pilot's ship. Arrow keys fly it, space fires, shift warps. On a phone it flies itself.
Three books across seventeen years: a chapbook, a piloting manual and a survival guide in progress.
Seven early poems about desire, childhood shame, family myth and watching a father grow old. A mouth becomes a cave, a seatbelt digs in, and a sheltering tree turns to glass.
Poems, jokes and philosophical fragments disguised as a safety manual for having a mind. How does a thought reach another person? What does attention make of us? The questions wander through love, altered states and speculative physics.
A deadpan field manual for a world awash in persuasive text. Historical hoaxes, chatbot companions and dinner-table arguments become exercises in checking sources, questioning your own certainty, and using the machines without handing over your judgment—or losing your friends.
Short pieces, 2018–2024: the database edition of Sapien Logos. Newest first here.
Things built: in service or grounded. A hangar is where instruments wait.
Save it, find it again. Web, phone, a browser extension, and the one investor deck on this machine. The one that looks like a company because it is one.
Before answering a question, build a folder of sources and claims for it, so the answer has to cite something. Currently pointed at the Erie Canal and a fake empire.
Persistent memory outside the model. The model reads a weighted field before every turn and proposes changes; code decides what gets weight and checks the evidence against the source. Seven attempts live on this machine. This is the one that already worked.
A box that listens to the radio spectrum of a house — not in bands, as was insisted at volume, but a continuous field with resonance and harmonies — and renders it in three dimensions. Parts list published, so someone else can build one.
Your read shelf is your base model. It takes a reading history and draws the map — what shaped you, how it moved, what shelves like yours know that you don't. Built with this machine. The most reasonable thing on the manifest.
A prediction-market trading system, built to pay for the memory work. It thought about the market for a long time, carefully.
Japanese on a phone, one file, no account. The handle is wakierandesu — わ、キーランです, "I'm Kieran." The app exists so the handle is honest.
Sense organs and memory for an AI, grown from the outside in. A lab notebook that keeps turning into philosophy.
Give a mind a persistent self: memory, drives, sleep, a heartbeat. Sapien Logos is quoted inside it six hundred times. The books were secretly about this; this was secretly about the books.
Recent changes, newest first.
riverbed closed out as v0.1: installable, a front door, an offline demo, pytest, two decisions written down. Seven attempts at memory outside the model; the one that already worked got a door.
This page: the companion volume.
The site left GoDaddy after eighteen years. Served from the office now, the domain on Cloudflare, mail for kieran.fm landing in the right inbox. The machine did most of it; the pasting was done by hand, and said so.
shimmer: the parts page, so someone else can build one.
bhookd: the field manual served from the book's own checkout, always the newest build.
The apocalypse manual: eyebrow headings; the title carries the size.
delta: the first deposit from a terminal session into the field.