Taylor Sloan

According to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, we're all influencers.

About Me

Hello there. My name is Taylor. I write things, mostly science fiction and essays of various lengths on topics like culture and technology. I also say words on podcasts like Science and/or Fiction. Occasionally I make things in a workshop behind my house. I also work as an adult/pediatric flight paramedic. When I’m not doing any of that, I like to spend time with my wife, daughter, and two cats.

You’ll come to find—probably fairly quickly—that I am deeply neurodivergent, and broadly speaking I am an anarchist. If you have any other questions, feel free to say hello.

Writing
  • Short Stories
  • Long Form
  • Essays
  • Other Stuff
Podcasts
Other Projects
  • Home Automation
  • Maker Shop
  • Miscellaneous
  • on being a dad

    on being a dad

    One year ago today was our first real day at home with our newborn daughter.

    We had spent the not-unusual two days and nights in the hospital after she was born, taken her home, and then shortly I had to return to the hospital for my wife to receive additional care. Being in the hospital for our baby’s first few nights at home without us was so hard at the time, but my wife and I have incredible mothers—and families in general—who stepped in to take care of her in our absence. A year ago tonight, when we came home, was the first night of the rest of our lives (all three of them).

    There are plenty of things people will tell you about parenthood before you have a baby. Some of it is meaningful, some not-so-much, but almost all of it is well-meaning. The most common one I heard was that becoming a parent really does fundamentally alter your brain chemistry almost immediately, and that you can’t really understand what that means until you experience it. Fair enough, I thought on hearing it. I guessed I would find out when it happened.

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  • The Lessons Young Taylor Learned Watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Part 1

    The Lessons Young Taylor Learned Watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Part 1

    I was in elementary school during the majority of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine‘s TV run.

    Sorry if that made you feel old. I might not have been the most normal kid in terms of my TV preferences. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the early Nickelodeon cartoons and shows like Power Rangers that were more targeted at kids my age, but Star Trek had captured my imagination in a way that no other shows could.

    It all started with Star Trek: The Next Generation, a favorite of my Dad’s at the time it aired. It had started a couple of years before I was born, and continued into my earlier childhood. I remember watching episodes of it with him when I was pre-school age and being absolutely enthralled by the settings, characters, and—in whatever way I could really understand them—the stories.

    As a young school-aged kid I would ride the bus home to my grandparents’ house, where with their pole-mounted TV antenna (we were in the country, about 50 miles from Indianapolis), VCR, and plentiful spare tapes, I was able to cobble together a collection of episodes of both The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine’s earlier seasons as they aired in afternoon syndication on our local UPN station.

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  • Hillbilly Elegy Is A Terrible Book

    Hillbilly Elegy Is A Terrible Book

    I suspect the only thing J.D. Vance and I have in common are that we both grew up in working class families in steel mill towns in the midwest, and we both have grandparents who moved there from Eastern Kentucky after World War 2. That—along with the fact that I hadn’t brought another book to read on my flight home—was enough to convince me to buy his newly-published book Hillbilly Elegy at a magazine stand in the San Francisco Airport.

    What I quickly realized after beginning the book was that he and I had a very different understanding of what led his family to leave Appalachia, why it is that so many people there are struggling to get by, and what the value of personal responsibility means in contrast to the issues Appalachians (and all working class people) face in this country.

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  • Serenity Gardens (A Short Story)

    Serenity Gardens (A Short Story)

    I’m working on new chapters of The Signal that will be coming out over the next couple of weeks. In the mean time, I hope you enjoy this short story I recently finished.

    The song I’ll Follow You Into The Dark by the band Death Cab for Cutie was playing. It had come out when they were teenagers. It was their song. This was the last time they’d hear it together, if she was even really hearing it. He believed that she was, or hoped it at least. Melanie Stephenson was asleep, or unconscious really. Wes Stephenson—her husband of 39 years—knew that it was unconsciousness. Sleep was something you woke up from, and he knew that she would not wake up again. 

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  • Untitled Weekly Newsletter – Vol. 3

    Untitled Weekly Newsletter – Vol. 3

    Interesting Things on The Internet:

    On Reddit: A guide for healthcare workers on providing compassionate care to trans folks:

    A Comprehensive Guide to Transgender Patients in EMS
    byu/TallGeminiGirl inems

    Other things I’m reading:

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  • Microsoft Recall Is A Very, Very Bad Idea

    Microsoft Recall Is A Very, Very Bad Idea

    Microsoft’s new AI-powered ‘Recall’ feature saves frequent screenshots along with associated data for access by the Copilot+ AI assistant.

    If you know anything about cybersecurity—and I mean literally anything—Recall seems like a really bad idea. The idea is to store hundreds of snapshots of your potentially sensitive computer activity, in order to allow Copilot to assist you in finding things you previously looked at. Essentially it’s browsing history, but for the entire scope of your computer use. Anything from your bank account password to sensitive health records will be saved, along with not-clearly-defined metadata about what you’re using.

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  • Untitled Weekly Newsletter – Vol. 2

    Untitled Weekly Newsletter – Vol. 2

    I saw a Tesla Cybertruck in Indianapolis for the first time this week.

    They are just as gargantuan and ugly in real life as they are on the internet. True to form and expectation, this one had just cut someone off from getting into the turn lane.

    My friend Lucas’s thought on them is this: “The perfect embodiment of the suburban pickup truck. Barely useful bed that’ll never get used for “tough work,” ugly as sin, mostly used to ferry rich guys and their children, high enough so you can’t see the pedestrians you’re killing. It’s like someone took an F-150 and turned all the dials to 11.”

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  • Untitled Weekly Newsletter – Volume 1

    Untitled Weekly Newsletter – Volume 1

    I’ve been wanting to start some kind of newsletter-type-thing for a while now. Right in the middle of the year seems like as good of a time as any to do it, right?

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  • Campus Protests for Gaza and the Right Side of History

    Campus Protests for Gaza and the Right Side of History

    I was born in 1989. Although I don’t really remember much about South African Apartheid, I remember when it fell.

    My grandparents actually had a newspaper clipping from 1994 about the fall of the apartheid regime that was kept in the middle drawer of their computer desk. As Quakers, they were against apartheid, and as I became older and more capable of understanding the world around me, they taught me more about what apartheid was along with many of the other racist anti-human systems baked into the function of our world.

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  • Trustworthy Organizations in Gaza for Donations

    Trustworthy Organizations in Gaza for Donations

    No one with a conscience should be able to see what is happening in Gaza and not want to help.

    Of course, the only real solution according to the UN and virtually every human rights organization in the world is a permanent ceasefire under which Israel can no longer kill thousands of innocent civilians, lay waste to the civic and residential infrastructure of Gaza, and prevent aid from reaching those trapped there.

    Until that happens, there are some organizations who are doing good work in Gaza to provide food, WASH, healthcare, housing, and search-and-rescue. Some have been there for decades, others have only come in since the beginning of Israel’s assault on Gaza in October.

    I have tried to do as much research and due diligence as I can to vet these organizations and their operational philosophy, but I am not a perfect person. If you know of any substantial reason why any of these organizations might not be considered trustworthy, please contact me and I will consider removing it from the list. I will also add additional organizations periodically as I find them.

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