the past ain't what it used to be

We have So Many Books, even after giving away a small bookcase worth, that I'll have reading material until I retire.

Right now I'm reading Eon by Greg Bear. I'm finding it a bit turgid but what's really fun is that it was written in 1985 about events in 2005.

The Soviet Union still exists. There has already been one limited nuclear exchange in the '90s between the Soviets and the US, and they are working their way towards another one. There are colonies on the moon and television broadcasts 3D images. The scientists in the story carry hand computers called slates and Apples are stun weapons used by security guards.

I'm less than a quarter of the way through the book, so I'm looking forward to finding out more about what the world was going to be like in 2005. But mostly it's just fascinating to go back to the Cold War and immerse myself in remembering just how fucked up that was. Not that things aren't fucked up now, but back then they were fucked up in a very particular and special way. I tend to think it was worse than the current "everybody be afraid of terrorists" version, but that might just be because I grew up with it so it had more impact on my psyche.

I may have to dig through the stacks for more books about the near future. They make for an interesting perspective on what we've been doing with ourselves for the last couple of decades.

And why don't we have colonies on the moon, anyway? Even just for mining or research?

living the dream

I'm not having my most productive day ever at work today. Go figure.

For some reason thinking about colonies on other planets and satellites sent me down the rabbit hole of thinking about intentional communities. I've met a number of people who lived in communes just from hanging around with pagans. (One I can think of in particular had been going close to 50 years at the time I met one of the members, and didn't show any signs of stopping. And that was at least 10 years ago.)

All the ones I've stumbled over or read about always seemed to be "on a piece of property somewhere out of the city" and that started me wondering if all intentional communities are necessarily rural. So I stuck a couple of terms into a search engine and started looking around.

Turns out that no, there are lots in cities. Including several in Toronto, which is kind of neat.

Just judging from what I found online it looks like Pagans and people interested in eco-housing seem to run about neck-and-neck in terms of wanting to start new communities. And that there is lots of overlap between the two, as you might expect. But that the real front-runners are Christians, who can list more active co-housing groups than everybody else put together.

And it also turns out that The International Church of Satan is starting a commune in Halifax. So there's that.




[ETA] I also found one called Lothlorien but I can't actually open the website because my work security deems it "suspicious". I'm finding that highly amusing.