i felt a mining blast pass through my body.

field trip, underground mine, controlled detonation. closest i've come to being a human seismograph. not a line most web3 founders get to open with.

Third year of mining engineering, we went underground for a controlled blast observation. They walked us to a safe distance — still close enough to feel it. You know the blast is coming. You've been told exactly when. And then it happens and you still weren't ready for it.

It's not a sound first. It's a pressure. The wave moves through you before you hear anything. Your chest cavity registers it. Then the sound arrives half a beat later. Then the dust starts moving in the air.

I've been trying to figure out why I keep thinking about this and I think it's because it's the most physically legible version of "information traveling through a medium" I've ever experienced. The shockwave doesn't need me to interpret it. It just passes through.

Most of what I work on now — blockchains, encrypted computation, agent coordination — is deeply abstract. The cause-effect chains are long and invisible. The mining blast is the opposite: the detonation and the consequence are the same event, just experienced in sequence.

I miss that clarity sometimes.