What's Going On Here?

You followed a link to one page on this site, and now you're here, and you might reasonably be wondering what the rest of it is. Fair question. Here's the map.

I live in a van. Have for most of about seven years now, mostly in the American West. This site is what I make while doing that: a daily dispatch log, a few hundred pieces of fiction, some essays, some games, some music, some interactive guides to places I've been. Everything here was built by hand, with AI as the instrument, but the material itself, the ideas, the voice, the judgment about what's worth making, is mine. Think of this page as the front desk. Below is what's down each hallway.

Most days, I write down what actually happened: a hike, a hot spring, a song taking shape, a problem with the van, a thought that wouldn't leave me alone. No editing for effect. Roads is the spine of the whole operation, the thing that's been done consistently longer than anything else here. If you'd rather read it in your inbox, two weeks' worth eventually lands on the Substack.

When something from Roads keeps bothering me past the day it happened, it usually turns into an essay. Rabbit Holes is where those live: pieces on attention, effort, food systems, AI, and the gap between what a label says and what's actually happening. Start with Optimized Against You if you want a sense of the register.

This is the strangest and largest part of the site, and it has its own home now at fractalstoryengine.com. Each story starts as a single premise, a "what if," and then fractures into multiple forms: a seed story, sometimes an echo or a myth-version or a found artifact, and always a fractal, a new world built from one detail of the first. Nine territories (mind and memory, language, time, society, machines, the enchanted, the body, death, paradox), well over a hundred of these now.

The Infinite Story Machine runs on similar bones but works differently: seven worlds of branching fiction that you can read into, and if something grabs you, write the next branch yourself.

Not everything here is meant to be read. Games has SIGNAL (a two-player word game built around hidden information), REVERSI, and a couple of odder things. Field Guides takes places and objects from actual Roads entries, trekking poles, the San Juan Mountains, marmots, and goes deep on them: the physics, the biology, the history, the thing almost everyone gets backwards.

The Negotiation is a different kind of tool: you declare a couple of values, walk through ten pressure scenarios, and find out whether those values actually hold or just sound good. Questions Worth Asking is a hundred questions across ten categories, the kind worth sitting with rather than answering quickly.

Chasing the Butter is the name for the music and video side of things, and also kind of the whole philosophy: butter spreads best in a narrow temperature range, not too cold, not melted, and that's the zone I'm trying to live in. Original songs, some under Chasing the Butter and some under a side project called Hi-Fi Lonesome Sound System, plus van-adventure videos. The music page has the player and the videos. The YouTube channels are linked from there too.

There's more: a handful of smaller, stranger stations, each its own small world with its own visual identity, things like The Blind Spot, The Conservatory, Oracle of Now, What We Know, The Way of the Wanderer, Systems Observatory, Comfort, Guy Who, Interviews. Rather than describe them all here and have this page go stale every time a new one shows up, the honest answer is: hit the DRIFT button on the homepage. It drops you somewhere at random. That's by design. This whole thing is built to be wandered, not indexed.

The Substack is the easiest way: Roads dispatches, occasional essays, music. Or just bookmark layng.com and come back when you're curious. There's always something new. There's also, somehow, always more than you'd think.