#21 – Aaron Burrell, Dustin Garner and Colin Sellers

#21 – Aaron Burrell, Dustin Gardner and Colin Sellers

October 13th, 2025

Angus Stocking (00:08.472)
This is Everything is Somewhere, I’m Angus Stocking. The episode you are about to listen to combines two interviews with three different interviewees. All three are licensed land surveyors who have been working on interesting projects. Let’s get right into it. My guest today is Aaron Burrell. He’s a land surveyor in Texas. And normally, Aaron, I know a bit more about my guests, but this one came together pretty quickly. You’re the author of a really fine article in the most recent edition of American Surveyor, about Recreating Stonehenge in West Texas. So, Aaron, maybe tell us a bit about yourself and what led to the writing of this article.

Aaron Burrell: I started surveying in the fall of 1994 in West Texas and probably about six years later, I was working for an engineering firm in Odessa and several years after working at the engineering firm, became a survey manager and we got approached by a couple of the locals wanting to, you know, do this recreation. They had this idea that they could go cut these stones out of their quarry and then come to the campus and make a recreation. So we got, you know, the local people wanting to do it, the university to donate the land, and then the engineering firm I was working for was going to donate all of the engineering and surveying necessary to make it work.

Angus: That sounds amazing. You know, a couple of questions occur to me right off. One is, it seems like such a good and even obvious idea to try to recreate ancient monument. Do you know if this has been done before? I mean, how many Stonehenges are there in the world?

Aaron: Yeah, at the time, in 2004, when we first started looking at this, there wasn’t near as much online research as there is now where you could easily just Google it and find a whole bunch. But there were a couple that I had found then. Today, it seems like there may be a dozen or more throughout the United States. I know there’s a couple more in Texas. The difference here, I think, is the size, the true scale, and then the orientation. A lot of that is either given on some of the other ones—either it’s not the true size and scale or it’s not the correct orientation. This may be one of the few where we hit.

Angus: Hmm. So it’s a one-to-one scale you’re saying?

Aaron: Yeah, pretty close. I don’t think the stones are as tall as they are in England. I think they’re probably about 80% of the overall height, but everything else is one-to-one.

Angus: Okay. And was much effort made to match the proportions of the stone—did you pick a specific “version” of Stonehenge?

Aaron: Yeah, that’s the first thing I asked them. I said, well, which version of Stonehenge do you want? You want the original one from four or five thousand years ago or the one as it sits today? And of course they wanted it to look just like it looks in England today. So we had to figure out which stones were still standing, which stones had fallen and those that had fallen, which way they had fallen.

Angus: I’m really impressed, Aaron, that you thought to ask that question because that’s the first question I would ask too, because Stonehenge is not anywhere near original—there’s been a lot of reconstruction and damage and recreation over the thousands of years it’s been around. So that was a really solid question for a fringe conspiracies, alternate historian—there you go—like myself. And also these are all limestone blocks, right?

Aaron: Right. I think they’re shale-limestone. That’s the proper terminology, but you can see in some of these rocks, if you’re standing next to them, you can see old sea life, you know, shells, little sea creatures, stuff like that. So the rock type is just as interesting as the stone circle itself.

Angus: You’re saying there’s some fossil—fossilized. Neat. So that would have been my first question. But then the next question, which sounds like you also got to, is Stonehenge something of an astronomer’s laboratory or a calendar? It’s the original.

Aaron: Right. I took it as a calendar back then. You know, with all the reading I did in 2004, I just saw it as a working calendar. And it was going to tell them when they were to plant the crops, when they were to harvest. They even had, you know, 18.6-year moon cycles marked out. I think it was probably just a good way for them to keep time.

Angus: Sure. Personally, I would also be curious about—in the ancient world, there was certainly an obsession with the sky and the movement of the zodiac and precessional numbers. You may or may not know this. I don’t know, but how long is it thought that Stonehenge was a functioning deal that… Was it hundreds of years or more?

Aaron: It was my understanding it was like over 5,000 years since the stones were dragged over there and stood up. And then, you know, maybe a thousand years after that, it was kind of used for different purposes, rituals or large parties where they had on the solstice, you know, that’s when the different towns would get together at the beginning and the end of those calendar years. I think it was probably built for one thing and then co-opted or taken over and then used for something completely different.

Angus: So you’re approached by kind of a dream client to do some interesting project and your employers are into it. They’re going to be kicking in and there’s a university involved. And just out of curiosity before we get too far, the group that was asking—what was their interest? Why were they trying to do this quixotic project?

Aaron: They’re local artists. You know, they do large metal sculptures, things like that. One of the guys, Dick Gillum, was the main guy trying to get this going. And I know he does those big sculptures and they put them all over town. So I think it was a way to bring more art into Odessa.

Angus: And Odessa’s kind of famous anyway, right? There’s an art center.

Aaron: Yeah, there’s the Noel Art Center, the Bush childhood home in Midland. And then the other things they made there in Odessa. There’s several other things in town, even since the Stonehenge, where they did 25 jackrabbits and everyone got to paint a jackrabbit the way they wanted to paint it and they were all over town. So I know that they’re constantly trying to keep up the outdoor art.

Angus: Super cool. Then of course—sorry—but of course, Friday Night Lights probably was the biggest thing, the football team there in Odessa. That’s how I know that name.

Aaron: Right, right.

Angus: I love that show or book. Okay, so you’ve got a site, you’ve got a client, is layout next or you must have been working with some sort of astronomy, sky tracker? What were the next steps from your point of view?

Aaron: Well, the first thing we wanted to do was figure out where we were going to put it on the campus. Where did we have permission? Where were they going to give us the room and how much room was needed? Because those moon stones that kind of represent the 18.6-year moon phases, they’re kicked out, you know, 300 feet or more. So we needed plenty of space to do this. And that was probably the first thing—where are we going to put this? Where are you guys going to let us put this?

Aaron: Okay. And then going out there and topo’ing that site to figure out what constraints that we had in that area, whether it was going to be drainage, a light pole that turned out to be in the way, anything that we could get back and give to the civil engineer so that he could tell us, okay, here’s the elevation that you need to set all your pads to.

Angus: And are these—do they have foundations or what kind of weight are we talking?

Aaron: Yeah, they are. I mean, they’re almost like building foundations where they’re designed to carry the weight of the stone. They’re probably a little bit bigger than the stones themselves. They’re offset a tiny bit. So you could probably see the bottom of the slab. If you’re standing there, we covered it up with rocks. So some of them you can’t and it looks more natural, but they’re for sure sitting on engineered slabs.

Angus: Just out of curiosity, what’s the weight or typical weight of a stone?

Aaron: I want to say 20,000. Let me see. Some of these numbers over 20 years, I’ve lost it; I have to look it up. But I want to say that those stones were some 18 to 20,000 in that range. Let me see if I can get there again.

Angus: So we’re talking a pretty good crane.

Aaron: Right. They came in on semi trucks, one stone at a time on the flatbed, and then they had a crane there to stand them up in position on top of the bolts. Yeah, this is saying between 12,000 and 20,000 pounds.

Angus: And so what’s next? You’ve got your site, you’ve got your topo done. Now you’re worried about alignments, and you mentioned the heelstone in the article. Were the moonstones also aligned as needed to track the 18.6-year cycle?

Aaron: They were. So I had to think about the alignment as, okay, in England, the heelstone—the sun rises and sits on the top of the heelstone on the summer solstice. So I had to make that work for Odessa. The problem being that the azimuth to the sun, it’s not the same in Odessa as it is there in England. So we kind of had to use some online resources from the NGS, from NOAA to predict the sunrise on that June 21st, 2004. And from there, that’s what set the angle from the midpoint of the stone circle to the heelstone. And then from there, everything’s just kind of hand oriented.

Angus: I’m sorry—go ahead.

Aaron: I was just saying that’s what everything is oriented from, that summer solstice sunrise. And once we had that azimuth then it was fairly easy, I guess, to calculate all of the other things because they were just relative to the circle themselves.

Angus: And this was before—this was like 20 years ago, you’re saying?

Aaron: It was 2004, yes, and this is how long it’s taken me to, you know, get the article out. I’ve been pressured to write it several years and just never did. And then finally had the opportunity this year to do it. So, sat down, took the opportunity and really feel like I came up with a better article than I would have 20 years ago.

Angus: It’s a great article. One thing I was going to say is that right now—I don’t know if you’ve listened to the episode I recorded with Jeff Wilson about the Serpent Mound alignments.

Aaron: I guess not.

Angus: One of the things I’ve learned is that in the last five, ten years, there are actually very good computer programs associated with what’s called archaeoastronomy. They can recreate the sky in different epochs and years and kind of lay out all of those alignments more or less automatically—just push button. You didn’t have that 20 years ago, I’m guessing.

Aaron: No. Uh-uh. No, I felt really limited back then. If I was able to do it now, I feel like I could be more comfortable in my solution because we were sweating it that morning, that first morning, whether it was going to work or not. And I was convinced by then it would, but it took me, you know, to the last two or three weeks before we were going to set the stones up to where I got to the point I was comfortable that this was going to work at every phase.

Angus: No real checks?

Aaron: The checks that I had were trying to do the days and months before, like on a random March 17th, trying to see if I could get out there at 6:30 AM and stake out with my GPS unit the azimuth from the center of that circle where I thought the sun was going to rise. And after doing that several times, got that confidence.

Angus: Hmm. And were you out there on the solstice picnicking?

Aaron: I was, yeah. The president of the university was out there. Lots of other people, everybody that had contributed to the project in one way or another. Everyone was there and they were there when it was still dark. We were waiting for the sun to rise and it was a little bit cloudy, didn’t know what was going to happen. And then sure enough, the sun came up and it stood right above that heelstone and everybody just erupted, clapped their hands. It was a good time, you know? But standing there in the dark, the president of the university leaned over and said, “If this doesn’t work, it’s on you. You know, this is your slaughter stone right here.” And I just smiled back and I said, “Just give it about 40 minutes—yeah, it’ll work.” So no, it was good. It was a fun time that first morning.

Angus: Did he offer a reward if you got it right?

Aaron: Yeah, they did. They treated me really well after that. We had several luncheons and dinners and appreciations, you name it, for a whole year after that, I think.

Angus: Well, it sounds amazing and I’m really happy for you. What a cool project and 20 years—you’ve had time to get a look at the lunar alignments. Did those work out for you?

Aaron: They did. I didn’t actually get to be there the first time 18.6 lunar cycle came around, but there’s a professor there at the university that’s in the art building and he’d helped get a lot of this done. And actually the replica is right outside of his art studio in the grounds there by the college. And he kind of takes care of it on a normal basis. And he was there that night. And he said it was as perfect as could be. While I didn’t answer the phone, he did call me about 1:30 a.m. and I got that voicemail saying, “Hey, it works. You did it. It works.” So I was impressed that we were able to do all of that and that hopefully years from now, you know, 50, 100 years from now, I don’t know, people are still out there watching the moon sit on the top of that stone or watching the sun rise on the top of that stone.

Angus: And for listeners, to kind of explain what’s going on there—the moon setting and rising swings across the sky back and forth over an 18.6-year cycle. It’s kind of an odd movement compared to solar solstice. And the ancient world was fairly interested in this. There’s a very famous alignment at Chaco where observation from one point every 18.6 years, a moon will rise between two tall pillars of stone. And it’s a very dramatic sight that’s been tracked by Native Americans for thousands and thousands of years. And that was happening at—well, we still keep up with that for tide gauges, I believe. Every 18.6 years, they change some information about the tide gauge. And it’s being tracked in Odessa, Texas. How’s it worked out since? What use does the campus make of it? Or are there any pagan sacrifices happening in Odessa?

Aaron: I think a lot of wedding photos; they have daily visitors. They told me a number—I think it’s 500,000 a year. There was some huge number like that where they said they have been counting the visitors now over the past couple of years. And there’s a lot of people that come through there. I think during the school year, a lot of the little towns close by, or they can get their kids there and back in the school day, they’ll bring them for a field trip and the art teacher will come out and kind of show them around.

Angus: And Aaron, did this give you any insight or appreciation into the ancient world and the building technology? Did you come away more or less impressed with what the creators of Stonehenge were able to do?

Aaron: Yeah, I wasn’t sure if that was something that they had set up over 50 years’ time, maybe, you know, in which case they were able to watch these cycles happen year after year and move stones and place stones. But I guess the most impressive thing would be how did they get all of those stones up there? That seems to be the mystery. Everybody has a different way of explaining how those stones got up there. But I think that would be the most impressive feat—getting those stones there and then being able to lift them, put the tops on them, and the actual construction of it. But as far as the layout, I really think they probably had several years of watching that and then fine-tuning it—story poles. And there was another one they found, I don’t know if it’s 10 miles away, 12 miles away, and they called Woodhenge. And it was almost exactly the same layout and it was made of wood.

Angus: Yeah, I’ve seen that. So yeah, there was probably—this may be the one that came second, and the other one was someone had the workings somewhere else in a wooden form. And then they thought, oh great, we can make this work. Let’s move it up here and get all these stones. So it probably was a second-generation, third-generation circle. On the stones and the transport, one of the things they’ve learned in the last decade or two is that they’ve been able to identify quarries by the fine details of stone types. And they came from either end of the British Isles and they must have required some sea transport or transport over very hilly terrain. Stones weighing tens of thousands of pounds. It seems an incredible feat of transportation, let alone the alignment and formation and the cutting of the stones. And there is something about the individual stone types that was so important that they needed multiple types of stone. It wasn’t all limestone; there was limestone. I kind of freak out about it. And it’s in the same area that we have crop circles, which is a fascination of mine, and the chalk drawings, and seems like it must have been Burning Man every year for a couple thousand years. There was something heavy going on there.

Aaron: I agree. I think the stones on the outer circle are a different type of stones than the stones of the inner circle. It’s got a horseshoe shape on the inner circle. And I think the two different circles are different types of stones.

Angus: Yeah, you’re right about that. And also they’ve recently found that there are some buried stones out there and that there were earth features that were further out and it was gigantic.

Angus: Aaron, this has been great. Thank you for making the time. Anything you’d like to—current work that you’re working on? The article is in the most recent issue of American Surveyor and we’re recording in 2025. And I encourage everyone to read that with an interest in land surveying or the ancient world. What’s going on in your life? Any other big art projects coming up?

Aaron: No art at the moment. I’m currently studying to take the Licensed State Land Surveyor exam in Texas. There’s only 59 Licensed State Land Surveyors right now. So I’m looking to be, you know, one of 60. And if I can add that to my resume in the firm I work for, we’ll be able to get all of the TxDOT pre-certifications, every one of them that they offer. So once that’s done, then I feel like we’ll be able to go after some different types of survey work that I haven’t experienced before—coastal boundaries, gradient boundaries, recording documents at the General Land Office. So that’s what I’m hoping to do with my future.

Angus: You interest me because I don’t think I’ve heard of this before. So this is another level of certification?

Aaron: It is. It’s at the state level. In Texas, we have the General Land Office and the General Land Office is the one that took care of all the land grants, right? From the sovereign to the public. And so any of that that’s still done even to this day is done through the General Land Office and they require what they call LSLS, Licensed State Land Surveyor, to do the survey for them. It’s not something that a registered surveyor can do.

Angus: Well, congratulations. And I would expect you to do extremely well. And also, again, great article. You know, I write myself for American Surveyor and it’s—in my world, it’s a very prestigious place to publish and Marc has always been happy to go along with some of my wilder stuff. As a piece of literature, I think you made a great contribution to land surveying. Thank you for that and thank you for making the time today.

Aaron: Yes, I appreciate it. Thank you.

Angus: My guests today are two friends of the podcast, Colin Sellers and Dustin Garner. Dustin has been on twice before, Colin once. Dustin was talking about land surveyors and folklore and also books as he’s written on the topic. And Colin and I talked about catastrophism, an interesting alternative history of the earth that was one of my favorite episodes from the past year. So Colin, Dustin, welcome back to Everything is Somewhere.

Colin Sellers: Thank you.

Dustin Garner: Glad to be here.

Angus: And specifically what we’re talking about today—this is kind of a roundup episode and we’ll see what happens—but I noticed on LinkedIn that the two of you have a video game enterprise that you started and titled For the Quest, I think. Sure sounded interesting and I sure don’t know a lot about the video game world.

Colin: Yep, For the Quest.

Angus: And Colin, I think you’re the lead on this—this is your company—and Dustin, you’re joining that. Colin, could you maybe start out: what does a person see on screen and what is the interaction like with this particular game venture?

Colin: Yeah, so the video game itself is a mobile and PC and it’s going to be on Apple and Mac computers. It’s a GPS first-person action role-playing game. And it’s based off—well, it was inspired by all of my adventures around the United States and how my interface with the PLSS system. So the short version is we are setting dungeon entrances that people can interface on their phones to access dungeons. And they can play it on the phone, play it on the PC. And it’ll all wrap up with skills that really I’ve used in the field my entire career. And it’s like a sneaky way to have people get into surveying, but also have a lot of fun because I love video games too.

Angus: What’s the GPS tie-in?

Colin: So, really similar to games like Pokémon Go. The phone GPS will get someone into the proximity of the dungeon location. I can set a latitude and longitude. And if the phone gets into—I think we have it set to something pretty wide, like 25 meters, but we can shorten that too. Anyway, get into proximity of our location and then open up the app. There’s a map on the app and it’s pretty cool—it’s like a drawn-out map, kind of like a pirate map, but kind of like an old-school hand-drawn map. Choose the quest to do and arrive at the location, engage with it, play a geospatial mini-game. And then access comes through what I call a dungeon token, and that token can either be used on mobile or saved on the profile and taken home to play on PC.

Angus: So let me ask some dumb old guy questions. I know Pokémon Go—that was a matter of basically walking around and coming across a geo-located, a little bit like augmented reality, right? Interacting with the thing. So when you talk about dungeon entrances, these are—you’ve already assigned them to coordinates around the United States or in cities or… That sounds like a lot of work. Is that what you’re doing or is it similar or what?

Colin: Well, yeah, most exactly. So there’s only one official dungeon location and it’s in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. Just because I wanted to test out the features that our developers put in and I was there doing some work, getting ready to go to the convention that I met Dustin at. He invited me to share some of his time on stage and, you know, thank you very much for that, by the way, Dustin, again. But I was there to go there. But I had a friend in Phoenix; he invited me over for dinner, but me and my family had some stuff to do and our developers had just dropped the feature to actually set coordinate points anywhere I wanted to, as long as I had a latitude and longitude. So over there, there’s a section corner—that’s an official For the Quest marker right now.

Angus: And so in future, do you plan on having more, or do people have to go to Sonoran to play, or…?

Colin: Wherever there is a survey monument, whether it’s the United States, Canada, Mexico, Japan, China, Europe, Australia, I can set a dungeon location. And that’s what I’m intending to do. We will start with the United States and maybe a little bit into Canada, because that’s where all of our developers are. And then we’ll just go out from there. But every single state will have several tens—maybe even hundreds—of dungeon locations.

Angus: Sounds epic-scale and ambitious. Dustin, what’s your in? I know you recently joined the venture and I think with writing or worldbuilding or—what are you doing here?

Dustin: So I met Colin out of the blue. He actually messaged me on Instagram after, I think it was right after my first presentation at WestFED. And he’s like, yeah, I’m making this game. And I’d heard about the saluted figure that was making a survey game, but didn’t really know much about it. And I was like, you’re the guy. And he goes, what do you mean, I’m the guy? And we just started talking and it was kind of one of those, you got chocolate in my peanut butter, you got peanut butter in my chocolate type moments.

Angus: That was a deep history reach for an allusion, Colin. I know what you’re talking about and I’m really pretty proud of it, but go ahead.

Dustin: So it worked out and we’ve been bouncing notes off each other and it’s like, what if we do this? And, you know, what if we make this type of item do this? And so we’ve turned our common survey practices and tools and all sorts of things—we’ve given them this kind of magical spin to it. So I’ve been helping him with the storyline side and he’s got these ideas and I know we were talking about the dungeons and I think—Colin, correct me if I’m wrong—I think Tyler said that we’re not going to have to actually go out and locate every single one of these by hand; they’re already in like a master list and thanks to our brothers and sisters in the GIS world, the latitudes and longitudes already exist and for cellular information their GIS is more than accurate enough for what we’re doing. So I’ve just been trying to come in and help with the writing side and story. And we have—I mean, as of right now, your first intro to the game is going to be very bare bones. It’s going to introduce the world. It’s going to introduce the tools. But we have, with the timeline we have, quite literally years of developing story already plotted. And I’ll be introducing the first of three books that’ll be taking place in that same world. Hopefully holiday season of ’25 or very early ’26.

Angus: Those who play will walk to or navigate to a starting point, which—there will be some sort of puzzle or a game to negotiate that. And they’ll be seeing something on their phone that appears to be in their vicinity. And then they will walk through that and interact, and then that will take them to the next phase or step or level and they’ll walk through—and it all sounds pretty great. Dustin, does your love of creatures come into this? Will that be part of the backstory here?

Dustin: Yeah. Yeah. So that was—the Creatures of the Compass is going to be kind of, I don’t know, a guidebook almost to the types of things that you’re going to be encountering. We’re working with—do we call them coders? Designers?

Colin: Developers.

Dustin: Developers, yeah. And so they’re going to—based on the entries in Creatures of the Compass—they’re going to design these monsters, and each dungeon is going to have an array of creatures. I think our first dungeon, we’re hoping to have three that we can showcase for a Kickstarter campaign. There’s going to be some dungeons where you’re not going to be able to kill the creature that’s living in it. You’re just going to have to evade it and try and dodge it while you’re solving puzzles. So it’s laying the groundwork and that’s going to be—that book is supposed to sort of mimic what the surveyors that are going to be playing will be creating, their own guidebooks along the way. And we’re really hoping that we can build a community around it, kind of like Pokémon Go, where people are sharing notes and they’re talking with each other and “hey, this works and this doesn’t work,” and they can trade dungeon tokens or weapons. So yeah, it’s definitely going to be—make sure to have a copy with you if playing in the field.

Angus: And Colin, did you have models of other games in mind that you’re trying to imitate or emulate or exceed or resist? How novel is your gameplay system here?

Colin: The earliest game that I remember playing was from the Ultima series; it was Ultima VIII: Pagan. And the Ultima series is really famous for its ethical dilemma system where you can choose good and evil. But as far as the first-person aspect of For the Quest, I would say my greatest dream of an intention of this game is a mixture of the Elder Scrolls series—say like Daggerfall, Morrowind, Skyrim—Borderlands, Diablo, and the GPS aspect is just really the closest thing I can say as far as like Pokémon Go. It’s really a traditional role-playing game. I just want one special mention—so Dustin’s title in our group is Loremaster, and I just want to say this before we go on: couldn’t be more pleased with not only meeting Dustin, but that he’s on our team because he—even though it wasn’t initially his project—he has a crazy infectious enthusiasm that I really appreciate. It’s really cool that I could tell someone about a project that we’d been working on for about two and a half years, two and a quarter approximately, and his posts on Instagram and LinkedIn that really caught my attention was his post about liminal spaces.

Angus: We talked about that in our very first episode together. I’m sorry, go ahead.

Colin: And that’s where—no, no, no, it’s all good. Without even knowing each other, without even seeing that post, one of the big parts of For the Quest is the liminal spaces between our world and the world that mimics ours, that links the dungeons into our world. I just wanted to mention that Dustin’s a great team member and, you know, he didn’t mention the Loremaster thing—which I love that title. I love it.

Angus: Well, while we’re complimenting Dustin—Dustin, you were actually the second guest that I’ve had on Everything is Somewhere. And it came about after your really great article about land surveyors in folklore and in particular in revenant and/or vampire folklore. And that really set the tone for the show—that we were going to be able to talk about just about anything; that it wasn’t a technology podcast and it wasn’t a business—it was geospatial-related, but that turned out to be pretty wide-ranging. And so we were able to talk later about crop circles and, Colin, about catastrophism. And I just interviewed Pete Kelsey—I don’t know if you know Pete, but he provides scanning services to Expedition Bigfoot and The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, the History Channel series. A very interesting guy. You both would be interested in Pete. So yeah, we all like Dustin. Dustin, before we started recording, you said something about another novel or another literary work that you have coming out. Why don’t you tell us about that?

Dustin: Yeah, yeah, I’m not—have to add that the infectious enthusiasm is just unhealthy amounts of caffeine. Not encouraging, but that’s what it is. But no, it’s—yeah, I’m working on—so I’m going to do—for starters, we’re going to do a trilogy and it’s going to be taking place in the same world as For the Quest, a different time period. And it’s going to kind of introduce the players to who the surveyors are, why this game—what you’re doing out there—and kind of giving more of a world-building in the background. So that when coming into the game, there’s already familiarity with tactics and the reasoning. And so the first one, Creatures of the Compass, was kind of tongue-in-cheek and it was educational. The most reviews that I’ve gotten so far have been from children actually. Surveyors have bought it and then I get a call or a text and they say, “My kid stole it. Won’t give it back.” That’s my favorite.

Dustin: Colin and his family came out, were passing through Cedar City where we live now, and we talked for a while. Those are the fun conversations because the kids still have such an imagination and wonder of the world.

Colin: Pretty good review—my kids included.

Dustin: They ask some off-the-wall questions and you’re like, well, I didn’t even think of it or look at it that way. One of my other favorite reviews was—if you’re familiar with Amanda Allred, she’s been an NSPS president, all over the place. She sent me a text one day and said, “Yeah, my little boy stole my book. He’s been sitting on the couch forever reading it.” And a couple hours later, she sends another—just a picture and it looks like it’s the same picture. And she’s like, “He’s still here. He hasn’t moved. He’s almost done with it.” So he sat and read it cover to cover. Keeping an 11-year-old’s attention reading an educational book—I’ll put air quotes on that—for that long was huge.

Angus: Would it be the monster aspect or the creatures? I could see that really working.

Dustin: Yeah, I think that’s definitely it—because when I was that age, when we went to Barnes & Noble or used bookstores, those were the books I gravitated toward, and I’d sit the same. So this—Amanda, actually, just this past June, her son passed away, and so we released the second edition. There are only three changes in the second edition: one, the cover’s orange—you’ll notice that right away—because I don’t know what Amazon’s doing with these books, but the white book cover wasn’t working. I’m pretty sure they’re playing soccer with them before they throw them in your box. So it’s orange now to make it look more like a survey field book.

But we did make sure to put a dedication in there for Johnny because he really was, at least to my knowledge, the biggest fan of this project. So it was important that that was on there, and Amanda’s been a really, really good friend and a really good mentor. So that’s in there. That one’s cheaper now, but it is going to play directly into this new trilogy. And this new trilogy is going to play directly in with the game. And we’re going to be—I can’t write these and then fire them all out immediately because it’ll give away important elements of the game that we want to surprise players with.

We don’t want them to be able to just look it up. We don’t want them to be able to kind of see what’s coming around the corner. We really want the story to be engaging and kind of hit them with that shock and awe at times and keep it interesting. So this won’t just be like, I downloaded this game and I’m going to play it for 10 minutes and I’ll get back to it. It’s going to be continuously updated. Like I said, we have years of storyline written.

Angus: Kudos to both of you for doing some interesting work and bringing some joy to the world and making land surveying sexy and interesting again. Another thing we talked about in our second episode, Dustin, is you have a charitable venture. Maybe just give an overview of where you’re at with that, what you do with Caritas, how people can contribute if they like—please inform us.

Dustin: Yeah. So, we’re still going. We’re actually—I think when we talked last, we were just getting started, brand new. So we’ve been settled in Cedar for—gosh, five months now, six months. We’ve started making our connections. We’re working with—we’re partnering with a couple other nonprofits in the area. One of them is Prevent Child Abuse Utah. We’ve been working with DCHS, Knights of Columbus. And so we’ve done a couple of things on our own.

It’s gone from everything from donating to help with medical bills for kids. There was a pediatric cancer. We’ve helped with a nonprofit that does custom equipment for kids with cerebral palsy. I guess they have—and I didn’t know this—but I guess they have to battle constantly with insurances because they don’t want to make custom medical equipment for the kids because it’s not necessary; it’s a comfort thing.

So they went out and they’re making custom medical equipment for these kids. We’ve done—gosh—we helped with a birthday party for a two-year-old; her first ever birthday party. And that sounds to a lot of people—you’re like, that seems kind of unnecessary, like an extra luxury. But one of the really important things to us is that these kids feel like other kids, and all the kids that they’re going to school with are having birthday parties and stuff, and that kid should have that too. So dignity is super important to us. We don’t really take secondhand stuff. I know it’s another one of those things, but when all you get are secondhand things, that makes you kind of feel secondhand. So we’ve been going out of our way trying to collect new clothes, new shoes.

And if there are families that we hear about that need them, then we make sure that they get into their hands. We’ve been working with Knights of Columbus for their Coats for Kids drive. We’re moving, we’re moving—doing things. You can check us out—I think on the last one I spelled my own nonprofit’s name wrong. It’s C-A-R-I-T-A-S, comm.org. That’s our website. But I think last time I switched the I and the T around.

Angus: We’ll get that in the show notes. So Knights of Columbus—think Caritas is kind of an umbrella Catholic organization, or is there a connection there?

Dustin: Yeah, we were founded—I went to an all-boys Augustinian school, and within the Augustinian community it’s founded on three pillars, and that’s Caritas, Unitas, and Veritas, or love, unity, and truth. So we kind of clung to the love portion, and it’s actually an Augustinian quote and it goes to the effect of, you know, it’s not one heart that loves your neighbor and one heart that loves God. So by loving your neighbor, in turn, you love God. And so that’s been a big thing for us: I’m not here to preach to anyone; I’m not going to say, “Hey, you have to take this Bible if you want this coat.” If you want to ask about it, I’m more than happy to point you in the right direction.

Angus: Well, I’ll tell you the reason I’m asking about it is my own connection. A couple of months ago, I started going to Mass kind of out of the blue, astonishing those who know me. And I’ll be starting classes in October and hopefully take Communion this coming Easter. So just to come out, I guess, as an aspiring Catholic—which, not to show. Thank you for what you’re doing and thank you for talking with us about it. Colin, like I said, the episode about catastrophism—one of my favorites recently—where are you at with that? You making sure that the earth is flat around lately, or where has your research taken you in this field?

Colin: Well, I know I mentioned the flat earth experiment the last time. I’m still getting into arguments—trying to convince, not even convince, just help people out, man. Just for the record—you know, I know not everyone’s going to watch that episode and watch this episode—I ran an experiment that I thought up to calculate the curvature of the earth using two mountains and a total station. It was explained very well and I loved it. It was a great segment.

Colin: You can lead a horse to water. But dude, I’ve tried to keep just trying to help people, because it’s one thing—the whole flat earth thing is really pervasive because of the internet. Someone can see a thousand pieces of evidence for something, but if they don’t understand the scientific method—of how to derive a reasonable conclusion from that—it’s dangerous. I still fight that fight because once something gets into our culture and it’s leading someone down the wrong path, it’s just going to keep messing people up. You can goof up a lot of aspiring scientists, aspiring surveyors, aspiring engineers; people need to be led the right way. And other than the flat earth thing—that’s really just a pet peeve of mine, to be honest.

Angus: I actually have a tangential connection there. I listened to another conspiracy podcast and they interviewed basically an apostate from the Flat Earthers. He was one of the crew that went down to one of the poles and observed 24-hour sun that was always on the horizon and basically stayed up the whole time to keep an eye on it and took that video. And he was a very fervent flat-earther and he decided that this was a good enough experiment to settle the matter for him. The poor fellow has been attacked by his former brethren and it was a fascinating listen—not so much for the flat earth aspects, but for the almost cultic online religion aspects of it. Interesting world and a kind of interesting self-check for me: how fervent is my belief in some of these things, and how objective am I? So, good time.

Colin: What gets me—I’ll do one more thing—what really gets me is no one understands—well, not no one, but I think you know where I’m going from with that—what level is. And that’s the thing that—no one understands what that means, other than surveyors, I think, and not all surveyors; it takes a minute of thought to understand what level actually is. Because you can be level in one point, go 10 feet, and even though it’s a fraction—a fraction of a fraction of an inch—it’s different everywhere you go, being drawn down to one point. So if you don’t understand what level is, how can you possibly figure out something by yourself if you don’t actually do the painful thinking of it? And then, other than the flat earth, I’ve been reading the Old and New Testament and digging into the Iron and Bronze Ages, specifically the Bronze Age right now, because of all the catastrophism that happened around that time—whether it’s the pre–Bronze Age floods or before or after, during, you know what I mean? But yeah, I’m just keeping myself busy.

Angus: Well, when you get somewhere you’d like to talk about, let me know. I’m into it. Dustin, Colin—any concluding thoughts as we taper off here?

Colin: Yeah, I would like to mention—so, here shortly, our developer team has started work on For the Quest again. There was a small pause due to side projects that our developers were taking and funding problems on our side. But we’re starting that back again, and that’s going to lead us to a Kickstarter campaign that we’re going to do, probably the next month or two, I think. I just want to bring attention to that.

Angus: Is there a URL you can send me now or will it take a month or two?

Colin: It’s going to take a little bit of time. I can send one in the next few days. We’re starting a Shopify store for For the Quest merchandise—stickers, magnets, shirts and stuff like that. That’ll help. And then we’ll link to the Kickstarter when that pops up. We need to finish—we’re just finishing our 3D assets for the game. Previously, we had bought some third-party assets just to test out the system, see what we like, see what’s going to work, build the bones of the game. But we’re developing our own assets, and the monsters are all based off of Dustin’s book, Creatures of the Compass.

Dustin: And there’s some good land surveyor-lot monsters in there. We’ll be getting people out in the field and then you’ll be going. I don’t know how well we explained this, but it’ll be an overworld map on the view until you get to the dungeon. And if choosing to play in the field, then it’s going to switch to the phone and you’re going to be playing with a controller on the phone. I actually got the chance to test it while Colin was here.

And it’s wild—you grow up playing games and writing stories for fun, and then he’s like, I’m doing this thing, and now I get to do this thing. So we get to kind of merge our two—well, I guess three—passions, if you count games, storytelling, and surveying, all together. We’re making this game. It’s not going to be something—we’re not going to be able to retire off this, we’re not going to be multimillionaires. But it is a project we love and we’re dumping our love into it and really hoping that other surveyors can take time out with their family and go do something fun.

Angus: Thanks for listening to Episode 21 of Everything Is Somewhere. Some interesting feedback came in this week from listeners. First of all, from Aaron Burrell himself. After reading Aaron’s article in American Surveyor Magazine, I emailed him directly and asked if he’d like to be a guest, and he responded, “Hello Angus, what a surprise to see you in my email box. I have listened to several episodes now and would love to come be a guest. I really enjoy the podcast, but I always seem to learn something.”

Well, that’s great feedback. I’m glad he’s enjoying the podcast and that he learned something, and that’s certainly been my goal for the show so far. Also, bit of an odd one—I received feedback from one Stuart Valentine, who writes from Thailand: a crop circle appeared in a field at my friend’s house in Hua Hin, Thailand on 1st October 2025. We emailed back and forth a bit and I learned that this was about a 45-foot-around crop circle. Little confused in the language, but sounded interesting and somehow a five-meter boa constrictor was part of the story. So there you go, listeners—report of a crop circle in Thailand, and that’s all I know.

As always, I welcome feedback. You can send me feedback directly at angusstocking at gmail.com or anonymously at amerisurv.com slash podcast. You can follow me on X or Twitter at twitter.com/Surveying

Last but not least, if you enjoyed this episode, I hope that you will subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or Spotify or rate the podcast or the episode. Finally, if LinkedIn is your thing, I hope that you will reach out and connect with me. I’m easy to find. There is only one Angus Stocking.