If we remembered our birth, we could not possibly fear death. Birth must be far worse. But we won't remember our death, so there's symmetry for you.

Dick Cheney is dead See? Anyone can do it!

All I found was a circle of sawdust The circus had moved on

Onlique Strategies

Ich bin der Sohn des Monsters

There was a reminder that the library was always seeking books, and that they paid in wine. —Postapocalypic newspaper item, Station Eleven: a Novel

Dead language says what? Vicipaedia is the Wikipedia written in Latin la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicipae...

"No one’s ever described as being unsparingly kind." -Station Eleven

Post-Scarcity models, in Sci-Fi or elsewhere, need to address Bataille's notion of The Accursed Share, elucidated in his book of the same name. He suggests that what drives economics isn't scarcity, but the need to rid systems of their unusable surplus, which otherwise becomes toxic.

"This great nation swapped Democracy for dictatorship" — Mr. Robot, Season 2 (2015) • I bet you couldn't find a single year in the last 100 in which this sentiment has not been publicly expressed

The human voice will be drowned out futurism.com/sam-altman-d...

Our MOTIVES often have little to do with our ACTIONS or I read my psychology, history and, yes, economics incorrectly!

Some people think of the glass as half full. Some people think of the glass as half empty. I think of the glass as too big. —George Carlin

"Machen's story was widely denounced for its sexual and horrific content and consequently sold well, going into a second edition." —Wikipedia, describing Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan

In the 17th century the Faculty of Paris was allowed one dead body a year, and the famous physician Mauriccau lay under grave suspicion of having illegally procured bodies to dissect for his anatomical studies. -The Vampire, His Kith and Kin, Montague Summers

St. Gregory writes of the word Angel, "nomen est officii, non naturae,"--the designation is that of an office not of a nature

Said aloud today: "Science is evidence based. Evidence is not science based." I realize now the guy was thinking about 'evidence' in criminal court cases. But, bro: no one in court is going to ask, "Did you try spanking your child at different elevations above sea level?"

All the meat, he thought, and all it wants. —Gibson, Neuromancer

“I try to live in the continuous present. Happiness, I would say, consists in living in the continuous present all over your body for as long as possible.” ~ Quentin Crisp

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it. —André Gide

Predictions of the future often seem to forget that change CHANGES things

Rewriting is easy Writing is IMPOSSIBLE

very early on in my academic career I realized that, as a professor, no one cared what I looked like. today... well I've never gotten more positive comments on my appearance than I do today. mostly from dudes, admittedly, but also young people of any gender —and every one of them about the beard.

David Byrne famously seeks the emotive quality of lyrics rather than their literal meaning. He's not wrong,there

Real people who've given their love to AI entities, my heart goes out to them. I think of artists seeking love in the gutter, abandoning their children for an ideal of freedom. Who cut off parts of their bodies to make some incomprehensible point. It’s a sad, bad mad life, no matter how you live it.

In some successful film or "televisual" adaptations of well known mystery stories the culprit is changed. I think we gotta stop calling them "whodunnits" and recognize that the vibes are all there is

"He was intelligent—when he bothered to be—but was in no danger of becoming a genius." —Clarke

New alien species: The VSSAR. Vegetarian Space Socialists who are Always Right www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9W7...

I've taught hundreds of young people to code on glitch.com, for its ease of use, generous hosting, brandable urls and kid-friendly interface. Come July 8, all that goes away. A community of millions of users running tens of millions of apps will vanish from the earth. It's a cryin shame.

"If men learn [to write] it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks." —Plato, _Phaedrus_

"We know things in the act, not in their essence." —Peter Putnam, as quoted by his students

"Space is small; only the planets are big" —Robert Kleinman

I guess it pays to google yourself (if you don't go blind) dreamforgemagazine.com/tag/don-mark...

I just discovered this page! fabulistmagazine.com/author/don-m...

On a long trip, the protagonist of Clarke's Imperial Earth watches some of the great films of history, including "Kubrick's Napoleon Bonaparte". Clarke's own history with the director lends the mention a double unreality, as this film was never actually produced.

I have this quirk where, whenever I see someone eating spaghetti, I want spaghetti. Could be in a film, black and white —could be a pair of cartoon dogs on a back alley date, one long strand between em! I guess no one ever regrets spaghetti. It may not be what you want, but its going to be alright

The public loves to be scared. It excites the imagination. Makes them believe in the existence of things unreal. —Boris Karloff, Voodoo Island

Ten-year-old Duncan Makenzie, dialing his grandmother, accidentally connects to a microphone exposed to the toxic winds of his home moon, Titan. Thus begins one of the most complex, literary, character driven, science fiction novels of all time: Imperial Earth by the problematic Arthur C. Clarke

"I begin by improvising a melody over the music...singing nonsense syllables, but with weirdly inappropriate passion... Once I have a wordless melody and a vocal arrangement...I like, I'll begin to transcribe that gibberish as if it were real words." — David Byrne, quoted in Boing Boing

A word to go with Orrery: I give you Tellurion!

I'm designing the cover art for an epub about puppets (it's ok, I'm a professional) and I want to use an image of rough stitching as an overlay —stitching that gives me frankly Frankenstein vibes— when suddenly my interest in puppets and my lifelong love of The Creature merge and I finally know....

"Fear stripped his nervous system down to a raw, twitching cluster of painfully acute antennae" —Alan Moore in Lovecraft

"I no longer judge writers by their worldly, artistic abilities. I judge them by the energies that they seem to evoke by occult, unconscious means, irrespective of their actual, artistic talent." —Alan Moore in the 1993 interview in which he calls H.P. Lovecraft "an American William Blake"

"This was why, he told himself, he had to live alone: Writing looked like nothing anyone would hesitate to interrupt."

I have to admit I've read "The Call of Cthulhu" many more times asleep than I have awake. Which is as is should be.

A reminder from @ryan-holiday.bsky.social‬

Animals which are clearly people. I'll go first:

There are those who see life as miserable, bleak, and try desperately to shore themselves up against the suffering of others. There are those who see life as miserable, bleak, and reach out, to huddle together with other sufferers. Now I know where to camp.

“Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.” —Warhol