Vertical Farms and the Price of Electricity
In March 2025, Plenty Unlimited filed for bankruptcy. The indoor farming company had raised $1.19 billion, and its valuation had fallen from $1.9 billion to $15 million.
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Scale Wars essays
The blog opens on Scale Wars: essays on Moon logistics, dust, lunar utilities, asteroid assay, reserve math, seafloor ore, and geothermal heat. Fiction notes sit below.
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Scale Wars is the lead shelf.
Books, world notes, and essays all live here, but the nonfiction Scale Wars series gets the front door.
Headline series
Scale Wars essays.
Start here for the nonfiction side: Moon logistics, utilities, dust, reserve math, seafloor ore, asteroid assay, deep heat, and the real bottlenecks of frontier industry.
Cross-Laminated Timber and CO2-Cured Concrete
Ascent, a tower in Milwaukee, was completed in July 2022 at 86.6 metres tall. Its builders used more than 80,000 cubic feet of glulam, which is timber glued up into thick beams, and 336,000 square feet of cross-laminated timber, or CLT.
Read essayBacteria in the Copper Heap
At the Sossego copper mine in Brazil, about 90 million tonnes of tailings sit where the mill left them. Tailings are the crushed rock a mine throws away once it has taken the copper it could get.
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Lithium and Uranium from Desalination Plant Brine
A reverse-osmosis plant pushes seawater hard against a membrane. The salt stays behind as brine.
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The Natural Hydrogen Well at Bourakebougou, Mali
In 1987 a water well at Bourakebougou, in Mali, caught fire.
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Ice and Frozen Volatiles in the Moon's Permanently Shadowed Craters
On October 9, 2009, the LCROSS impact hit the floor of Cabeus crater, at 89.7 degrees south, and dug out about 350 metric tonnes of material.
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Lunar Relay and Navigation Satellites: Lunar Pathfinder and Moonlight
A command sent from Earth to a machine on the lunar surface, and the reply that comes back, take 2.6 seconds for the round trip.
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Asteroid Mining Starts With Assay
The serious version starts with composition, sample behavior, processing, logistics, and an in-space buyer.
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Lunar Oxygen in Cryogenic Propellant Depots
A tank of liquid oxygen on the Moon has to be held at 90 kelvin, ninety degrees above absolute zero.
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Seismic Surveys of the Deep Continental Crust
In Germany, a scientific borehole called KTB was drilled 9.1 kilometers into the continental crust.
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Lunar Regolith as Ore: Mare Ilmenite and Highland Anorthosite
Soil returned from the Apollo 16 landing site, in the lunar highlands, is 27.18 percent aluminum oxide by weight and 8.09 percent calcium oxide.
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Polymetallic Nodules on the Deep Seafloor
In a 2022 pilot run by NORI and Allseas, nodules came up from the seabed to a ship through a riser pipe about 4.3 kilometers long.
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Sintered Regolith Roads and Machines in Lunar Dust
In the European Space Agency's PAVER work, a 12-kilowatt carbon dioxide laser melts a spot of simulated lunar soil 4.5 centimeters across, then moves on and melts the next.
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Superhot Geothermal Wells at Krafla and Reykjanes, Iceland
At Krafla in Iceland, a well called IDDP-1, drilled for the Iceland Deep Drilling Project, ran into magma at about 2.1 kilometers down.
Read essayEssays
The Emperor Has Some Clothes
Essays on modern China. Each one starts from a documented event: a midair collision, a market halt, a port lease, a fire in Urumqi.
The Pilot Who Held Up His Email
On January 24, 2001, a Chinese fighter closed to within twenty feet of an American surveillance plane.
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The Circuit Breaker That Lasted Four Days
On January 4, 2016, the new circuit breaker tripped.
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Red Health Codes for the Henan Depositors
In the first week of June 2022, a 38-year-old software engineer from Jiangxi province bought a train ticket to Zhengzhou.
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The Girl Found After the Search Stopped
At 7:30 on the evening of July 23, 2011, lightning hit a signal assembly on the Yongtaiwen high-speed line near Wenzhou, in Zhejiang province.
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The Rose Garden Line and the Bunkers
In September 2015, Xi Jinping stood beside President Obama in the Rose Garden and said China had "no intention to militarize" the artificial islands it had built in the South China Sea.
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A Life Sentence for Zhou Yongkang
Zhou Yongkang had sat on the Politburo Standing Committee, the handful of men at the top of the Chinese Communist Party.
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Water Where the Fuel Should Have Been
In the summer of 2023 the People's Liberation Army Rocket Force lost its leadership.
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The Thursday Fire in Urumqi
The fire started on a Thursday evening, November 24, 2022, in a residential tower in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang.
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The White Sphere Over Myrtle Beach
On February 4, 2023, at 2:39 in the afternoon, an F-22 Raptor at 58,000 feet fired one AIM-9X Sidewinder at a white sphere drifting between 60,000 and 65,000 feet over the Atlantic, six nautical miles off Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
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The Great Hall Declaration of February 25
On February 25, 2021, Xi Jinping stood in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing and said China had achieved a complete victory in its fight against poverty.
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Twelve Days Out of Libya
On February 22, 2011, Muammar Gaddafi's security forces opened fire on protesters in Tripoli, and the Libyan state started to come apart.
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Nine Days After the Bund Speech
On October 24, 2020, Jack Ma stood at the Bund Finance Summit in Shanghai.
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One Hour Before the Anniversary
On June 30, 2020, at 11:00 p.m. local time, the National Security Law for Hong Kong took effect.
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Fine Wine and Shotguns in Stockholm
On March 12, 2020, Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian posted a tweet suggesting the United States military might have brought COVID-19 to Wuhan during the Military World Games in October 2019.
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Nine Missiles After the Songshan Landing
On the evening of August 2, 2022, a U.S. Air Force Boeing C-40C carrying House Speaker Nancy Pelosi landed at Taipei Songshan Airport.
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7,648 Cracks in the Coca Codo Sinclair Dam
Between 2013 and 2026 China put about 1.399 trillion dollars into more than 150 countries under the Belt and Road Initiative, the program of overseas roads, ports, railways, power plants, and digital links announced in Xi Jinping's early years.
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Fourteen Grievances and a Submarine Pact
In April 2020 Australian foreign minister Marise Payne called for an independent international investigation into how COVID-19 started.
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Ninety-Nine Years on Hambantota
In December 2017 the government of Sri Lanka signed a 99-year lease that handed operational control of Hambantota port to China Merchants Port Holdings.
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The Score Wired Described in October 2018
In October 2018 a feature in Wired described China's social credit system as one algorithmic score given to every citizen, deciding whether that person could board a plane, get a loan, put a child in school, or book a hotel.
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Three Hundred Days Inside the Grid
In September 2023, FBI Director Christopher Wray sat before the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and described a campaign the intelligence community had named Volt Typhoon.
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Six Months Across America in 1988
In 1988 a Chinese political scientist named Wang Huning received a fellowship to spend six months traveling in the United States.
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The Village Factories the State Did Not Plan
Yasheng Huang, an economist at M.I.T., has spent two decades irritating the standard story of Chinese growth.
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Sixty-Two Cases and Four Clean Wins
Across sixty-two cases spanning twenty-five years, the chapter's ledger is not the one either camp wanted.
Read essayProject notes
Slop Dealer has notes.
Short notes on why I built the site, how the series work, and what I'm writing next. Zero spoilers.
How Cinderwake gets rebuilt
A spoiler-free look at air, heat, bunks, ruptured bulkheads, and why rebuilding the base drives the story.
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How people find safe paths in Wavefall
A spoiler-free note on painted route markers, blocked corridors, safe rooms, and navigating Homebush when the city shifts.
Read postFiction world notes
Start with the plain version.
These posts unpack the core worldbuilding without spoilers. When a strange term appears, I explain it on the spot.
The Landing
Crashed starship, heated rooms, strange valley.
Ecology, practical magic, and a crew discovering what their ship can no longer solve.
Magic behaves like weather in The Landing
Vethara is the local magic field: think weather patterns, soil health, and ship sensors struggling to catch up.
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Why the ship cannot solve everything
The fabricator is useful, but it is not magic. Every printed part burns feedstock the crew might need later.
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Living signs in Kethan Valley
Soil, crops, dirt tracks, and winter food pressure make the valley legible before any scanner explains it.
Read noteCinderwake
A dead orbital base that still demands a crew.
Scrubbed air, recycled heat, salvage runs, claim jumping, and the dirty jobs that keep a wreck habitable.
Why Cinderwake starts broken
The station starts with fouled air, failing power, freezing bays, and survivors who need a secure hatch.
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The Graveyard Reef hides the base
Hulks and dead stations keep Cinderwake hidden, but every repair run has to navigate the debris.
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Law can be a weapon in Cinderwake
A corporate faction can reclassify, rename, or legally claim the habitat before the crew gets a hearing.
Read noteWavefall
Sydney gets system rules and people run into hard limits.
Ability slots, actual suburban streets, safe corridors, and what happens when Sydney turns into an RPG map with lethal stakes.
How ability slots work in Wavefall
Skills have limited slot capacity. Mod chips slot in and change how each ability behaves.
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Why Homebush works as a map
Stadium paths, loading docks, service tunnels, arterial roads, and open ground give the system rules real terrain to break.
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Sydney becomes a LitRPG map
The geography still has train lines, tunnels, port berths, and suburbs. The rules change, but the map stays real.
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