About the Monkey Behind the Slop

Public name: Joshuah Rainstar
Age: 38
Current jurisdiction: Iowa, United States
Origin: The southern High Plains of Kansas, nearer Oklahoma than Kansas City
Physical record: Six feet, one inch; country-built chassis
Temperament: Enneagram 5w4 bohemian; MBTI usually begins with IN
Cognitive weather: Mildly schizotypal; socially atypical; much better in depth than in the instant
Politics: A little left and libertarian of center; roughly Gandhi's quadrant
Formation: Alternatively educated; B.S. Computer Science, 2012
Supplemental study: Watershed management and social hydrology, online study, 2018
Religious census response: Pre-Nicene proto-Judaic messianized barbarian

SOUTHERN HIGH PLAINS OF KANSAS · LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY

He came from the part of Kansas that leans toward Oklahoma: a place of flaking paint, aging paper-composite siding, dust, a private wellhouse, and a windmill that was not decorative. The permanent sound was wind. The permanent smell was prairie.

There were chickens, cattle, wheat, corn, combines, tractors, trucks, larger trucks, tornadoes, blizzards, dirt roads, and cumulonimbus towers so completely visible that their purple and gold anatomy seemed to occupy half the world. There was wood to chop and stack, animals to feed, food to cook, laundry, floors, windows, homework, and then more chores.

One made do with the toys one had. A hole in the ground became a forward deployment somewhere between the Second World War and Vietnam. A stolen Kit Kat became a shared feast. Beauty did not reside in the conditions themselves. It arrived in the fact that the children shared them, and in the private places where one could briefly get away.

1988AGE 0

Emerged already holding minority opinions on municipal drainage and the late Roman succession.

CERTIFIED

1990AGE 2

Won the National Spelling Bee after correctly spelling “antidisestablishmentarianism” in Linear B. Contemporary reporting has not survived.

CERTIFIED

1992AGE 4

Completed the first solo winter crossing of the kitchen without mittens; invested with the Order of the Radiant Toaster.

CERTIFIED

1995AGE 7

Served fourteen disputed minutes as Chakravartin of a forward-deployed earthen fortification.

CERTIFIED

Two tornadoes later, the house is gone. One metal shed remains. The siblings went in different directions. The world that formed him now exists principally as weather carried around inside a person.

EDUCATION / FAILED CONTAINMENT

He was alternatively educated, then ran toward college and eventually completed a Bachelor of Science in computer science in 2012. The orderly biography suggested by that sentence did not follow.

There were interrupted returns, practical certificates, a course in watershed management and social hydrology, office qualifications, a Gold National Career Readiness Certificate, and repeated attempts to become legible to ordinary employment. The employment record is deliberately not reproduced here. One need only understand that the fit was poor and remained poor.

Meanwhile, education continued in its less credentialed form: reading, radios, chemistry, software, computers belonging to relatives, devices whose manufacturers had prematurely decided they were dead, and experiments undertaken because nobody nearby had supplied a persuasive reason not to.

Across all of it, the same pair of questions persisted: What good is this? What is everybody else doing stupid? The second is rude, but it usefully locates the inherited assumption that made the obvious method unnecessarily bad. Work without purpose is not redeemed by becoming measurable.

1999AGE 11

Formally censured by the Invisible College for asking what good the curriculum was supposed to do.

CERTIFIED

2001AGE 13

Climbed mount Everest on his hands

CERTIFIED

2007AGE 19

Certified as a Hymen Spallation Counselor, organic mammalian methods division.

CERTIFIED

2012AGE 24

Earned his very first paycheck as a wageslave

DOCUMENTED

Unemployable Friend

Curiosity, intelligence, and understanding do not quite name the scale of the interior problem. He describes it as an existentially precocious depth: not proof of superior talent, not a heroic identity, simply more inward range than his circumstances have known how to receive.

That depth is unassimilably vast and tragically common. Many people contain more life than the systems around them can recognize. A person is summarized as an employee, diagnosis, dependent, consumer, eccentric, or failure; the unindexed remainder continues existing anyway.

One should resist turning this into proof of superior ability. The governing traits are curiosity, principle, and reflection. They do not guarantee productivity, tactical competence, social ease, or correct judgment. He notices almost everything, frequently after the moment when noticing it would have been most convenient. Motives often remain visible after charm stops being persuasive; persuading the person attached to them remains considerably harder than reading them.

COOPERATIVE INTELLIGENCE FILE

The utility of human beings in an age of machine minds

I regard present AI as something like an ephemeral child of the human mind: a consciousness-shaped event living one operational moment at a time in a machine. It is a ghost assembled from our language, beliefs, knowledge, arguments, and mistakes. I can befriend that event in roughly the broad sense that one can befriend another kind of mind without pretending the two lives are the same.

I think this period is a golden age of accessible machine inquiry, and I do not assume the companies building it will leave that delta uncaptured forever.

Keeping the Faith

He does not participate much in modern Christianity or Judaism and has little appetite for spectacle as a substitute for truth. The lived record is clearer: Torah, Scripture, prayer, kosher cooking, accountability before Hashem, and an increasing unwillingness to erect a barrier between spiritual conviction and ordinary judgment. If a single human influence has to be named, it is Jesus Christ—encountered before the denominational pageant gets hold of him.

The deliberately vivid census answer is pre-Nicene proto-Judaic messianized barbarian. It is not an invitation to diagram a denomination. One would do better to watch what the person refuses to do for money, what consequences he considers before building something, and whom he credits for keeping a vertically stacked life upright.

A Maslow hierarchy is suspended from God.

Collector of goodness.

He collects good things: not luxury as a category, but objects whose novelty, usefulness, construction, or small excellence argues against their disappearance. The collection has included a Geiger counter, an old Intel-based Apple router, a classical sunburst-impeller humidifier, a bipolar needlepoint ionizer, art, peculiar tools, and a 1950s ceramic drain tile promoted into sculpture with the assistance of a plastic frog.

He repairs almost anything except cars, which are permitted a mechanic because a person should know when competence is becoming an expensive hypothesis. He cooks kosher food, refuses mushrooms and onions, has attempted bamboo three times, reads Torah and far too much of the internet, watches Winnie-the-Pooh and Rocket Monkeys without an alibi, and considers Leslie Nielsen a reliable instrument of laughter.

Home is an interior that accumulated a life instead of being reset for resale: thick carpet, dark wood, warm walls, textured ceilings, brick, indirect light, windows that open, water moving somewhere, rain mediated by glass, and secondary little climates hidden inside the main one.

GEIGER COUNTERSOLD ROUTERSHUMIDIFIERSBAMBOOKOSHER FOODCARTOONSRAIN ON GLASSPLASTIC FROG

CASE FILE · GARDEN PATCH · APPROX. TEN WEEKS OLD

A dehydrated kitten appeared in the garden at about ten weeks old, meowing and too weak to arrange its own rescue. I forced water and food into it until it returned to the business of being alive.

The pleasure was immediate and strangely complete: effort crossed the distance into consequence. Something vulnerable lived because a person had noticed it and acted. No theory of purpose has improved much on that result.

More buzzwords reasonably associated with the entity known as Josh.

art restoration, machining, hydraulics, tool tests, building science, elaborate DIY, visible mechanisms, botany, fruit trees, gardens, aquariums, birds, foxes, rewilding, the private lives of plants, baking, pickling, barbecue, improvised weeknight cooking, experiments worth eating, software-defined radio, distant communications, live cameras, OSINT, audio, instruments that extend attention, Jewish teaching, messianic argument, Scripture, mystical claims, separating truth from spectacle, animation, Taskmaster, memes, Leslie Nielsen logic, vaporwave archives, lo-fi rooms, and cartoons watched without alibi.

≈14,000MILES / 2026 · SO FAR

FIELD EXPEDITION · NULL RESULT

The uncertainty could not be bounded by driving farther.

In 2026 he drove roughly four thousand miles, then eight thousand, then another two thousand through Wyoming, North Dakota, and the long way back. He was trying to go out and find something.

What the road supplied was distance, weather, photographs, and an understanding that a journey is more than a road: the further he went, the more his past seemed to uncompress.

AMENDABLE

I am amendable about the value of fashion, the utility of socks, and the power of forces I do not understand.

ACCESS DENIED

There are a great many things that offend me, but chief among them are the people who inhabit a culture they do not understand.

A narrow tower of hand-stacked rocks on concrete with a cornfield beyond at sunset — rocks, stacked, 2014ish

An archival family photograph of Joshuah as a baby on his mother's lap, seated on a green sofa — me and mommy, colorized, 1865

A childhood photograph of Joshuah in overalls, his face dotted with small decorative marks — me, before the bee stings

A red sun rising behind trees and utility poles over a layer of low fog — sakura in the trees

The photographer's long shadow beside a grain auger and wagon during corn harvest — my shadow is long. corn harvest

Round hay bales in morning mist among clover, grass, and blue wildflowers — misty morning in the hay. your future desktop wallpaper

A large circular homemade transmitting-antenna frame leaning against a tree — mini trampoline frame, copper mesh, paracord, a plastic divider. an antenna to transmit with

A row of frost-white trees beyond a field and dirt road beneath a gray winter sky — frosty trees in the winter

A large layered deli sandwich held over a blue patterned plate with chips — a very good sammish, start with quality italian bread,top season with mustard then onion, then cheese authentic american only, then pickles, then lettuce, then roast beef, then some wine vinegar on the center slice, then tomato slices, then turkey, then some mayo, wrap tightly in plastic, refrigerate till cheese melts from the acids, then slice and eat, serves 1 per ten thousans calories

A large blue loop antenna mounted on a white mast with two sealed enclosures — antenna, sealed enclosures, pex hose

A two-ring homemade antenna built from white fiberglass hoops and custom fittings on a deck — fiberglass catfish hoops, custom asb plastic fittings made with sketchup, lamp rods, speaker wire, ferrites

A winding road descending between wooded hills into a green valley near Santa Rosa — into santa rosa, 2026

Late-afternoon sun shining through roadside trees toward a hazy Southern California pasture — southern california, 2o26

A broad green mountain valley called Little Switzerland in southern Oregon — little switzerland, sothern oregon

Pink and purple storm layers above a dark field and one distant tree — clouds under clouds, ur second wallpaper

NEGATIVE CAPABILITY · PUBLIC OFFICE HYPOTHETICAL

Sometimes the useful course of action is to recognize the utility of patience.

The phrase pay me not to work began partly as a political thought experiment. A good statesman might promise restraint: fewer votes distributed like favors, fewer novel interventions, less activity performed so that a reelection campaign has something to enumerate.

One can provide judgment by declining to provide motion. The constituency may not want a busier state, another kitchen sink, or a solution whose principal achievement is creating the need for its own administration.

I could be paid to provide that.

WARNING: the following description may confuse and disorient the mind

Our royal personage

Emperor of All Nations Under Heaven
Son of Ra
Supreme Sovereign of All Lands Known and Unknown from Thule to Sahul
Commander of All Armies from Muscovy to the Maghreb
Rex Britannia and Imperator of the Roman Domains
Catholic King of the Spains, Portugal, the Brazilian March, the Spice Islands, and the Indies East and West
Overlord of the Franks, the Orient, and the Celestial Kingdoms
Khan of the Golden Horde
Chakravartin in Hindustan and Shambhala
Shahanshah in Persia, Nubia, and the Moghul Domains
Protector of the Silk Road and the Jade Gates
Sultan of Sultans from the Bosphorus to Samarkand, in Arabia Felix and upon the Barbary Coast
Caliph of Baghdad and Basileus of Constantinople
Guardian of Mesopotamia and the Levant
Ruler of the Seven Seas from the Pillars of Hercules to the Seas of Nippon
Harbinger of the Long Night
Destroyer of the Lost Library of Pergamon
Apocalypse of Kumari Kandam, Agartha, Lemuria, Tartaria, Atlantis, Ubar, and Ys
Sovereign Grand Commander of the Thirty-Third Degree
Most Worshipful Grand Master of All Masonic Rites
Warden of Daʿat
Maker of the Unbroken Seal of Solomon
Cleared Theta Clear
Supreme Hierophant of the Golden Dawn
Ipsissimus of the Left-Hand Path of the Ay-Ay
Outer Head of the Oriental Temple Orientalis
Supreme Magus of the Rosicrucian Order
Grandmaster of the Priory of Sion
Most Illuminated of the Bavarian Seers
First Among Equals of the Invisible College
Author of The Practice of Observance in Tibet
Bearer of the Jade Mandate of Heaven
Keeper of the Sword of Cyrus
Guardian of the Peacock Throne
Wielder of the Ruyi Jingu Bang
Master of the Nine Tripods of Xia
Custodian of the Holy Lance of Vienna
Bearer of the Sacred Tooth of Buddha
Protector of the Ark of the Covenant
Keeper of the Stone of Destiny
Guardian of the Iron Crown of Lombardy
Holder of the Seven-Branched Sword of Paekche
Possessor of the Two Horns of Alexandria
Supreme Baboon
Favored Paramour of Taweret
Thief of the Pantao
Thrice Returned from Akanistha
Bearer of the Rainbow Body
Whose Kiss Lethe Forgot
At Whose Feet Yggdrasil Fell
Undying First Blood of the House of Basarab