Come not between the Nazgûl and his prey! Or he will not slay thee in thy turn. He will bear thee away to the houses of lamentation, beyond all darkness, where thy flesh shall be devoured, and thy shrivelled mind be left naked to the Lidless Eye.

Welp, I guess it's time to go up to the house.

JUDGE FANG: Let's review what we have so far. You are 37 years old. Almost 20 years ago, you co-founded a CryptNet node in Oakland, California. It was a very early node—number 178. Now, of course, there are tens of thousands of nodes. PHYREFOX (hint of a smile): You almost got me there. #DiamondAge

-2272: Ethras forcibly absorbed into Bazian Empire -2204: Foundation of the Ark of Baz -2037: Ark of Baz becomes state religion of the Empire -1800: Bazian Empire reaches its peak #Anathem Neal Stephenson

#Anathem pronunciation hints: Arbre is pronounced like “Arb” w/a little something on the end. Consult a French person for advice. In a pinch “Arb” will do. A ¨ above a vowel = dieresis. The vowel in question gets a syllable all its own. e.g. Deät is pronounced “day ott” rather than “deet”

Call the dark side of the moon and tell them we're gonna dust.

We now consecrate the bond of obedience.

Without downloading new pics what's it like dating you?

Clarification.

Petal called the city "Smoke"… This was nothing like Tokyo, where the past was nurtured w/a nervous care. Here history seemed the very fabric of things, as if the city were a single growth of stone & brick, uncounted strata of message & meaning, age upon age>

Club Justine, Jimbo's, Sad Jack's, Rafters…Coretti could never be sure where he'd first seen her. She might have been in any 1 of those bars. She swam thru the submarine half-life of bottles & glassware & the slow swirl of cigarette smoke. She moved thru her natural element, 1 bar after another.

So I picked up the phone. It was my friend #BruceInnes, calling from the Circus-Circus. He had located the man who wanted to sell the ape I'd been inquiring about. The price was $750. #Fear&LoathingInLasVegas

Still haunted by our hitchhiker's remark that he'd never rode in a convertible before. I was tempted to give him the keys & zap off on a jet to Miami & rent another convertible for a run all the way out to the last stop in Key West & then trade the car off for a boat. Keep moving. > #FearLoathing

ROOM 3655 MAJ BENCHLEY: Ladies & gentlemen this is a flying saucer. YAHOO: That's the one I saw! B: It's made of pewter & thrown across the lawn by 1 of my children…Last year Americans shot more than 7 billion photographs. Now where is the indisputable photographic evidence? > #CE3K

JUANITA: I came here voluntarily. HIRO: Like Inanna…Why? J: This is it, the nerve center of a religion that's brand new AND very ancient…getting to observe the birth of a new faith. H: But it's terrible. Rife is the Antichrist. J: Of course he is. But it's still interesting.

RAZ: There’s no way to get from the point in Hemn space where we are now, to one that includes pink nerve-gas-farting dragons, following any plausible action principle. Which is really just a technical term for there being a coherent story joining one moment to the next.

Living on the bridge, Chevette was used to people being around, but everybody had something to do up there. The sharehouse was full of USC media sciences students & they got on her nerves. Sat around accessing media all day & talking about it & nothing ever seemed to get done. #AllTomorrowsParties

EFFIE: Where is Caspar? ZEBULON: They’re shooting at apples. E: Everyone needs to get their butts back inside right now. KAZI: Everybody get down! [TEDbots attack] TETA: I need a bigger gun! CASPAR: ??? T: The really terrifying one! C: They’re all terrifying! T: The one that says “Dame Judi Dench”

TETA: Prisons don’t have to have bars. I was in 1 that was a bunch of shacks on a moon. They drop you off & say “good luck” CASPAR: Like Escape from NY. T: What? C: It’s a movie…on my planet. T: Wait! The guy with the eyepatch? C: Snake Plisken T: SNAKE. PLISKEN! I love that guy! > #MidnightBurger

5. Hematology: C: Have you used your inward awareness to test his blood? J: Normal for Fremen diet & life 6. Look like you're thinking: CHANI: … MORGAN FREEMAN: This was a trick she learned from the Reverend Mothers. 7. Nuke the problem from orbit: CHANI: Get me the raw Water of the maker.

A mud-daubed woman w/long skinny breasts brings Goto Dengo coconut milk & knuckle-sized grubs wrapped in leaves. Her skin is a tangle of overlapping ringworm scars & she is wearing a necklace that consists of a human finger strung on a piece of twine. The grubs squirt when Goto bites down on them.

[present day] Across the Pacific Ocean, in a small town located ⅓ of the way from San Francisco to Los Angeles, computers are seizing up, crucial files are disappearing & email is careening into intergalactic space, because Randy Waterhouse is not there to keep an eye on things. #Cryptonomicon

Manila Bay, 1941 As their ship eases into its dock, a crescent shaped formation of flying fish erupts from the water. Each one strikes the water with a metallic click & the clicks merge into a crisp ripping noise. The crescent glides beneath a pier, around its pilings & disappears in the shadows.

I had always wondered why there are dragons perched on the cathedral's pendant lights. The dean recently explained that they represent evil & that the light (bulbs) represent God (Canaanite weather/battle deity, lounges on ceilings) which blocks the dragon from doing whatever.

unauthenticated remote code execution

Bates Motel somehow making fun of RFK's roadkill shenanigans as far back as 2013.

This was the first record-scratch-you’re-probably-wondering-how scene I remember seeing.

3rd string DC Comics villain redolence.

Home Home was BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every 1K megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. NYC & Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation.

Washington Fyre Festival

The Romans were uncommonly advanced in microbiology.

Hydration break

she walks downtown with her suitcase in her hand

Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort. [see 3rd image]

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. This page intentionally left blank.

Those aren’t actually shoes.

testing new limits for images on Bluesky (10 stills)

I met a Scottish girl in Boston Who was going to school in Spain We sang 500 Miles at the RedSox-Rangers game! ht: @ellisor.net

MOSES: Kill every male among the little ones & kill every woman who has known a man by sleeping with him. But all the young girls who have not known a man by sleeping w/him, keep alive for yourselves.

SMAUG: Barrel-rider! Your feet came from the waterside and up the water you came without a doubt. I don’t know your smell, but if you are not one of those men of the Lake, you had their help. They shall see me and remember who is the real King under the Mountain!

One of my favorite Cabo Verde facts is that it has a genre of music that arose after an abandoned ship washed up in 1968, carrying hundreds of keyboards and synths

This required a rather large logick mill.

Silencio sees the watches arrayed like fish from some warmer season frozen hard in lake ice. Bright highlights off steel & gold. He has been colonized by an order uncomprehended: the multifold fact of these potent objects, their endless differentiation, their individual specificities. >

🇨🇻

RICK BLAINE: Well, there are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn't advise you to try to invade.

Sometimes the top of a cake is on fire and a boy must blow on the fire with mouth wind. This is the scariest cake. I do not want this kind. But I will eat any other cake. Any cake that is not the fire cake that tries to kill the boy.

Hugo, Nebula … Porizkova

Just reposted everything mentioning Baltimore, Maryland.