>*“You can cut all the flowers, but you cannot keep spring from coming.”* – Pablo Neruda I can’t help but to compare my last two weeks of this month to the phrase, ‘in like a lion out like a lamb’. While the phrase is a reference to the transition between winter and spring weather patterning, it seems to also be reflecting my inner world as well. I too hope for that promised ‘out like a lamb’ as I continue my upward battle through LaunchCode’s software development bootcamp and eventually Data Engineering. My parents are pushing for AI Engineering and I understand why, our circumstances are dire and they aren’t going to improve in the long run. But personally, I’m extremely conflicted. I know I have the ability to focus on things like Ai Ethics, regulation, or even in flipping these technologies for the better. But I’m also afraid… I don’t want to go down a path where my ethics and values fly out the window. On that note, I’ve been in a state of overwhelm with all that I have to learn and the pressure from my elderly parents to essentially ‘get it all together before they die’. Being chronically ill and having the pressure of getting an accessible well paying job so you can support your other family members is a whole other level of stressful and I ended up crashing into a multi-day burnout cycle. At one point, I was looking at lines of JavaScript and my brain just refused to continue working. I’m still on the road to recovery from that and actively working on taking longer breaks throughout my day, despite feeling like I’m not going to finish on time. I also started measuring how much I’m writing each week to get an idea of how much work I’ve been putting in each day. I reached a total over 6,000 words this week in addition to writing code. So, I’m exhausted, I’m burned out, I’m ethically conflicted, and I just want to rest and recover from the dystopian hellscape we are all being dragged into. I want to work on projects that help us all recover from this nightmare and work on bringing about alternative futures. Yet my days are filled with lines of code and Ai jargon, while I have to regulate my ecological research to the night time hours. It’s grueling and at times it feels like a double life until a thought occurrs. … In science fiction, dystopia and the version of capitalism we are all living through, fall under the genre of Cyberpunk, which eventually birthed the Lunarpunk aesthetic and Apocalyptic Ecology. Lunarpunk can be imagined as a middle stage towards utopia after the rejection of dystopian dreaming. Whereas, Apocalyptic Ecology is embedded in the now. It is a blend of aesthics and science, with a basis in critical naturalism and eco-mysticism. It rejects the cyberpunk dystopia we are currently living through and recognizes that it not only leads to apocalypse but that we are currently in the midsts of it. By moving from the liminial future to a situated present, we bypass the dreaming of far flung utopias for on the ground work today. We live it, we experience it, we breathe it in, and spit it out. We are entangled in cyberpunk machinations, the technic’s hypostases reaching closer and closer to their end goal of human replacement, but we cannot give up and I won’t. No matter what happens, even if I have to get a job in A.i. I will work tirelessly for a day where the machinations of machines and machine like men no longer have the power to extinguish our world, our dreams, or our futures. ## Links - [Civilizations: A Book Club (part 1), feat. Lizzie Wade](https://www.solarshades.club/p/civilizations-a-book-club-part-1?utm_source=%2Finbox&utm_medium=reader2) - [The Coming Waves of Digital Addiction](https://josebriones.substack.com/p/the-coming-waves-of-digital-addiction?utm_source=%2Finbox&utm_medium=reader2) - [The Real Story Behind 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'](https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-real-story-behind-zen-and-the?utm_source=%2Finbox&utm_medium=reader2) - [Studying paleography in the digital age](https://thearchivistjournal.substack.com/p/studying-paleography-in-the-digital?utm_source=%2Finbox&utm_medium=reader2) - [Generative AI vegetarianism](https://sboots.ca/2026/03/11/generative-ai-vegetarianism/) - [Too Late For The Earth, Too Soon For The Stars](https://newdesigncongress.org/en/pub/too-late-for-the-earth-too-soon-for-the-stars/) - [ Who Will Re‡ember Us When The Servers Go Dark?](https://newdesigncongress.org/en/pub/who-will-remember-us-when-the-servers-go-dark/) - [The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh](https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-09-27-econopocalypse-subprime-intelligence-e9a06136d109) - [Pluralistic: Billionaires are a danger to themselves and (especially) us (09 Mar 2026)](https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/09/autocrats-of-trade-2/) ## Reads - ‘The Familiar’ Leigh Bardugo - 'Smith of Wootton Major’ J.R.R. Tolkien - ‘The Adventures of Tom Bombadil’ J. R. R. Tolkien