January 2012
15 posts
“Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic? … Well,...”
– John Steinbeck, East of Eden (via fuckyeahexistentialism)
December 2011
12 posts
“I believe that two tools, Goals and Identity, are very powerful instruments...”
“There was a full-page picture of the most extraordinary creature that I had ever seen. It was the wild dream of an opium smoker, a vision of delirium. The head was like that of a fowl, the body that of a bloated lizard, the trailing tail was furnished with upward-turned spikes, and the curved back was edged with a high serrated fringe, which looked like a dozen cocks’ wattles placed...
Ikat stopped walking, and mimed a toast. “To the coming generations. May they always start something they can’t finish.”
—Induction, by Greg Egan
“If only I could tell you what I know, oh! how you’d dance!”
On the lonely job of progressive activism.
Dear activists, helpers, those who rail against the onslaught of ignorance and the like.
You get in many arguments, I see, and on topics that are well worth speaking up about. Social injustice, racism, sexism, ableism, privilege and a whole host of other inequalities that still exist in a world that isn’t what it could be.
Please know you’re making a difference. Remember when...
With apologies to Greg Egan
“For most people, navigating their own psyche is like wandering in circles through a maze. That’s what evolution has bequeathed us: a miserable, confusing prison. And the only thing crude drugs like cocaine or heroin or alcohol ever did was build short cuts to a few dead ends – or, like LSD, coat the walls of the maze with mirrors. Grey knights allow you to reshape the entire maze, at...
“That particular rat, number two hundred, had a theory about humans. He suggested that perhaps, despite their obviously large heads, considerable manual and verbal dexterity, their complex nesting and decorative structures assembled from inanimate objects, and behaviour patterns in general suggesting a fairly high level of curiosity about the universe, humans didn’t really know what...
The second best year of my life
Happy birthday, me!
I wanted to write another piece much like I did last year, but really there’s so much in common with it that I’ll just link back to then for the curious and for my newer followers, with a few additions and re-affirmations tacked on here.
The centre of all that change was a change in my attitude. Damned near everything from there onwards changed all those trite...
November 2011
19 posts
When mimicry and the ouroboros meet.
“…humans’ desire to mimic came to a head in the small west Georgia town of Cochran in 1986. Two ornithologists, James Tarry and the appropriately named Joshua Bird, explored the county for a species that hadn’t been seen in almost eighty years.
One of the last unofficially reported sightings of the Passenger Pigeon, Ectopistes migratorius, occurred in Cochran in 1923, although...
“The trick to not feeling cheated is to learn how to cheat. So, I decided this...”
– Penelope, The Brothers Bloom (via fuckyeahexistentialism)
“The weapons were placed in the bunker which they had built the night before. The...”
– Melissa Riedal Ephesian, The Field Where I Died
“At times I almost dream.
I too have spent a life the sages’ way, and...”
– Agent Fox Mulder, The Field Where I Died
(My favourite hour of television, ever)
October 2011
17 posts
Awarewolf
