wait until people find out about how important bill clinton is in marathon lore

Marathon seems to be getting hit with a big wave of “it’s great but can you make the game in my head instead” style feedback

stepped outside for a vibe check and saw a beast fuckin hauling ass towards Bethlehem

ON MOUNT CHIXCULUB AND MARS MINOR The Moon is the world’s tallest mountain, but, in turn, its only mountain without a base. Throughout its phases, its peak faces away from Earth, taunting astronauts and mountaineers alike to take the final climb. It.. www.greaterrealityarea.net/on-mount-chi...

one of the things I love about marathon is it gives you zero time to familiarize yourself with anything. dream logic in a rational universe. you wake up in a new body, even your personality is unfamiliar. there’s a button somewhere you know you need to push but you’ll probably wake up before then.

The elephant’s foot in Chernobyl scares you? Wait ‘til you see the rest of the elephant.

It feels. So good. To be back

Next Greater Reality Area piece will be subscriber only. Even if you can’t come along for these, I hope you’re enjoying the ride with me.

there was a great gathering of the grunglers and nobody thought to invite me. disgraceful

I think what frustrates me about the literary concept of “magic systems” is that magic is not Physics 2, but an elusive set of anti-empirical phenomena. Our own real world “magic systems” are essentially loose heuristics for attempting to access something which resists any form of mechanistic laws.

it was www.northofreality.com/tales/2015/5... by @uel.bsky.social (thanks @sweetnawful.bsky.social)

I don’t know how to explain it exactly but this is corrrect

If the past doesn’t yet rhyme with the present, it will. history is langolyrical

Fun trivia: this is the first piece across all of NoR and GRA in which I have ever used the word “rhizome.”

A WELL-PRESERVED SECRET The vegetable lamb of Tartary did not bleat when bound by its hind legs, nor when verdant blood spilled from its neck into wineskins and jars. More fruit than beast, its flesh, ground with peppercorn and mandrake root, was stuffed... www.greaterrealityarea.net/a-well-prese...

I need everyone to shut the fuck up about the collar bone child. there is no good reason to care. we have bigger problems

“And this is how I discovered, that the tower was out of alignment. The Black Deer told me: Don’t Be Afraid.”

THE TROUBLE WITH SAN FRANCISCO It looms over the city like the abandoned lance of some dead Cold War god; perhaps the hills beneath it were formed from his irradiated corpse. It is the only civic landmark as obviously visible as the bridge to its north. www.greaterrealityarea.net/the-trouble-...

it is possible to cultivate a healthy relationship with your death drive

slayer of argus is hermes’ most used title. zeus was fucking around with io behind hera’s back; he turned io into a heifer to hide her. hera set argus, a many-eyed giant—two eyes always awake while the others slept—to guard io. at zeus’ request, hermes first charmed argus to sleep then killed him

The largest ocean is the atmosphere. We are the fish beneath its surface. Every jetstream is a current. Every plane crash, a shipwreck.

hermes’ association with thieves probably also gave him this lovely epithet; the darkness is an ally to his stealthy sliding through our seemingly closed boundaries bsky.app/profile/tiny...

LIFE IN THE VAST LANE Upon birth, the North American cumulonimbus cloud rolls down from the Rocky Mountains, and from there, ever eastward into its notorious adult form, scraping along the troposphere with its anvil-like plumage. Cloudforms throughout... www.greaterrealityarea.net/life-in-the-...

On tails, the king and Vizier swap places. Remove it from the board. Players are not permitted to acknowldge that the Vizier existed for the rest of the game.

ILLEGAL, BUT NOT FORBIDDEN: The Vizier. If the vizier is adjacent to its king, flip a coin. On heads, remove the Vizier from the board, damage it beyond recognizability, and dispose of it in a suitably ignominious manner.

FORBIDDEN CHESS PIECES: The Prophet, who is aware of the hands which move the pieces. The Crows, placed on the board after the final turn.

MODERATOR: "Is the 'Cool Ranch' a real place?" BEN SHAPIRO: "There. Is. No. Cool. Ranch. It's all branding. The left insists on propping up these false realities. This isn't even a fair question to ask." ANTHONY BOURDAIN: "I don't think I've ever been to a ranch that isn't, on some level, cool."

twitter holdouts keep bawling about coming over to bluesky because there's annoying people here... compared to... actual evil

the american empire is permanently wounded by the existence of amazon prime... if we had DHL prime global society would have been achieved a decade ago

why are we like this in america

who’s ready for some freaky parapolitics campaigns? deeply looking forward to this

WINGS ON WALLS (feat. art by @tinyobscurae.bsky.social ) When wandering through American cities, one will often find wings painted on walls, fully disconnected from a central body plan, yet anticipating their inevitable presence in photography. They are... www.greaterrealityarea.net/wings-on-wal...

when the day comes, they know they lose without electricity, and you can see that woven into it all

when this cultural pressure valve finally goes off its going to be something else

If you're someone who likes reading and sharing on tumblr, I'll be posting monthly updates here as well.

that rounds out pieces for January; more than a hundred of you have already signed up! Thank you for reading and spreading the good news!

WINGS ON WALLS (feat. art by @tinyobscurae.bsky.social ) When wandering through American cities, one will often find wings painted on walls, fully disconnected from a central body plan, yet anticipating their inevitable presence in photography. They are... www.greaterrealityarea.net/wings-on-wal...

if bobby hill ate the gomu gomu no mi, would he have made it as far as luffy

One of the great things about working in HIT is sometimes you'll get added to a groupchat just called "Rabies" or similar

Given the volumes of new people I should do an introduction thread. I'm Uel, I live in Minneapolis currently, and have lived all over the United States over the last decade. I was part of the fiction-writing side of weird twitter, from around 2012 onward, and wrote a good deal before the downfall.

This is the first subscriber’s only piece; there will only be one per month! I hope you’ll come along for the ride, as even just signing up for free helps the publication grow and reach more people. Weekly storytelling soldiers on despite the rising fire.

one thing fallout gets wrong is that waffle house would have found a way

I'm really tired of seeing all these dem politicians saying "well we all want secure borders, but-" in all these fucking pressers. I don't really give a shit how good my neighbors are at doing paperwork. I don't think people who say "come here the right way" understand that they themselves couldn't.

Longtime #Dinkytown shop owner Greg Ketter is the 70yo you may have seen in a TV interview speaking his mind and walking away into a gas cloud. The September 1985 Southeast (Minneapolis) neighborhood newspaper noted his shop's move from above Gray's Drug to a street level entrance around the corner.

Pretti seems like a guy I would have liked to have known.

The Greater Reality Area is some of the best short-form writing I may read all year and the paid piece does not disappoint. subscription is worth it, to me, and probably to some of you too.

This is the first subscriber’s only piece; there will only be one per month! I hope you’ll come along for the ride, as even just signing up for free helps the publication grow and reach more people. Weekly storytelling soldiers on despite the rising fire.

THREE COCKTAILS FOR BREAKING CURSES SUBSCRIPTION FEATURE The recipes featured below are excerpts from the “The Lamentations of Arthur Anne Bunting,” an enigmatic cookbook believed to have been written in 1977 by a pseudonymous folklorist who claimed to... www.greaterrealityarea.net/three-cockta...