[UPDATE 10/21/2021 -After 2018 I started posting my updates on my Patreon page, and so I'm filling in the back-logs for this project retroactively so the whole story is in both places. You can also read all of these posts with their original photo formatting here]

June 30th, 2021

Hello Dear Patrons, and welcome to another monthly update.

It was 116 degrees in Portland this weekend, a new record for as long as we've been keeping score. I feel like I've been preparing for this kind of thing to happen my entire life, but it still comes as quite a shock when it does actually happen.

I don't know really know what to say or make of it just yet, but I invite you to let yourself feel the reality of it sink into your bones for a moment, while that feeling of 'way too hot' is still fresh.

For the rest of all of our lives, no matter what any of us do, the weather will become increasingly inhospitable. There will be heatwaves, cold-snaps, hurricanes, droughts, wildfires, and floods.  But that doesn't mean that what we do now doesn't matter. It means that what we do now matters a lot.

But what, exactly, do we do? I can't tell you what the right thing for you to do is, but I can tell you that I have asked myself this question many times, and the conclusion that I've come to is this:

Everyone has a different opinion about how they think the world should be, and we don't have time for everyone to agreed about it, nor is that likely to happen, ever. But there are certain things that all humans will always need, and so it makes sense to just focus our energy there first.

Food, water, shelter, energy, waste. No matter what happens, come hell or high water, any information that helps people meet the basic needs of the people around them, using the things they have around them, will always be useful information.

I called this page "disruptively useful" not because I think the stuff I'm working on is currently disruptive, but because I am convinced that there is such a thing as disruptively useful information - information that is so useful that it can actually change the way people do things, simply by being available to them.

If you and your friends can build something useful that helps you take care of each other, and you share that information so that other people can build that thing too, then that information can spread around the world faster than it ever has before. The potential and need for us to change how we do everything has never been greater.

So if we're going down, let's go down swinging for the fences. If we're shattering world records for temperature, let's shatter world records for how much carbon we can sink into the soil, how much plastic we can pull from the oceans, how many people we can care for the people around us using nothing but wind, rain, trash, and sunshine.

This month, on the hottest day of the Holocene, after the sun finally set, I set two small personal records. I ran my generator for 26 minutes, unassisted, on the stored biomass-gas alone, for the first time. I also learned how to auto-start the generator with just one button for the first time.

Not a world record by any means, but a personal best.

This coming month, my goal is to finally be able to measure ALL of the inputs and outputs of the biochar reactor. These numbers will mark a milestone that I've been working towards for a long time - the ability to quantify exactly how much carbon this system can pull out of the air, how much trash it can decompose in the process, and how much solar power it can convert into useful energy.

Those numbers probably won't be great, or at least, they will probably need to be greatly improved before they become disruptively useful. But to know for sure, I need to find out what those numbers are, so that I can set new records, and break them, and invite other people to break them, over and over again, until we're setting world records, and breaking them, over and over again.

Thank you for all your support, and remember, all the documentation that I have on this project so far is available here.

Stay tuned!