Dennis Towne's Home Page
General
I'm a builder and systems engineer. I make things, organize things, assemble things, understand
things. I've also come to realize over the years that the best way to make the world better
is to cooperate with others, encourage others to cooperate, and help others be more
awesome. Many things in life are positive sum games, and since I tend to plan for the
long haul, I prefer to cooperate over defecting.
I obtained a degree in electrical engineering with minors in math, physics, and CS in 1997.
In spite of my hardware background, I ended up being better at software, and have been
working on the software side ever since. Software allows me faster and more interesting
expression than physical things, but I still work with matter from time to time.
Most recently, I've been working for Google on the Gemini serving backends. I've also been
working on applying to medical school; I finally got all my missing coursework handled and
took the MCAT in mid-2025 (and scored 520!)
You can find my resume here. I keep it fairly current. It
is typically updated every 6-12 months.
In my personal life, I have had a number of hobbies over the years:
- I've been running an online text-based game
with a rather large contingent of visually impaired players since 1995
- I dabbled in digital signal processing for a handful of years
- I played bass and sang in half a dozen bands
- My wife and I earned black belts in
Shaolin-Do Kung Fu
while in Louisville, Kentucky
- I've been to burning man four times
- I spent five years running my own company
- I'm medium-skilled at snowboarding
- I've been slowly working on a space-based game called Stellar Aeon
Writings and Projects
- Alter Aeon MUD
A MUD is an text based 'virtual reality' game, where you can log in and
interact with other people. Alter Aeon is the MUD I run in my spare time, and it
has been open to the public since the summer of 1995. It has a solid, long lived
player base and caters extensively to the blind and visually impaired.
- Essays
Everyone has a pile of essays on their web site these days. This is currently pretty
thin; I'll pad it out over time.
Image/Picture Filesets
Fiction
- QNTM
This has lots of cool stuff, and some wierd but fun short stories. The
Fine Structure and
Antimemetics novels are easily my favorite.
- Accelerando
A future history of the next hundred years. It's very conceptually dense, with a
lot of transhumanist and future tech terminology. Contains one of the most plausible
"slow takeoff" AI catastrophes I've seen in print.
- Everything2 - The Custodian
The Custodian has several stories which really caught my interest. The two biggest:
- Autonomy
This anti-copyright screed happens to have a neat story in it about uploading. I read
the very early versions of it in the late 1990's, and it helped me form a lot of
opinions about uploading and instancing people. The copy presented here is an
earlier version under CC licensing, and you can find updated / rewritten versions
of the book on Amazon by the original author.
- Orion's Arm
Collaborative Fiction in a slow-bootstrap singularity future. I ended up learning a lot
about wormhole physics and general relativity by researching things I found here.
- EFNI
EFNI is a vast treasure trove of hard science information on the combat and ship
specifications in the Babylon 5 universe. Keep in mind that the maintainer of the site
knows english only as a second language - don't let the broken grammar fool you.
This site contains without a doubt some of the most technically sound,
hard-science descriptions of the technology in the Babylon 5 universe I've ever seen.
Other Links
- [hobby] Louisville ShaolinDo
This is the school where I got my black belt. It's a small school run mostly by an
extended family of brothers, and it has a long history with very good, very well
trained instructors. They're not slave drivers, but they expect a lot and you can
go far as long as you're willing to put in the time. If you're in that area, you
may want to take a look.
- [games] Gemcraft Abuse
This is a harrowing tale
of my exploits and abuse of the final level of this fun little flash game.
To write Dentin a letter, send mail to: soda@xirr.com
Alter Aeon main page