Shock them, impress them, and melt

(via the junk monkey on flicker)

Sinofuturist.

O N OLD B L A Z N G B L AZ N G B L A Z N G B L A Z N G B L A Z N G B L A Z N G B L A Z N G B L A Z N G B L A Z N G THE THE THE THE THE THE

Erica T. Carter & human Parnassus.

The arts of fascination--can & will be automated; the arts of deliverance--never.

Cloud Time.

    "Buffalo

He knew how he would die. We all know that.
Some day the same as any other he'd be chewing his cud
And ruminating about the larger weather patterns
The clouds spoke of when Whump! like the trump of Doom
He would be stampeding to his death
With the whole country around him, their pounding
Hooves sounding like the drums you sometimes
Heard when the herds of horsemen camped
In some canyon close by, the very canyon it might be
In which he was destined to die.
Aiee! they would cry, or words to that effect,
As they sat by their fires beating on the stretched skin
Of one's relatives, which was their way
Of saying We won! We won! They were
An intolerable presence and he prayed
That someday someone would come, someone
Even nastier, someone even worse than the wolves,
And kill them, level their smelly villages
And cover them with rocks, like the rocks
He would lie on and rot when it came
His time to join the great stampede and die."

--Tom Disch (2008)

Santa Muerte.

"Autechre have always implied a kind of future music - as in, a sound that points to a possible futuristic norm. Now that this future has finally arrived, listening to Autechre from the angle of the present is akin to enjoying a favourite meal rather than trying to acquire a difficult new taste." --Charlie Frame

Crowdsourcing Pluto's 2 new moons.

"It's hard to imagine anyone else playing whale-summoning tunes to an overflow canine audience at Bennelong Point." --review of recent Laurie Anderson performance (via Silliman)

Freckenberg.

"Part of the meaning is lost and the pronunciation sounds wrong if the [Polish diacritical] marks aren’t there." --Washington Post (via languagehat)

The Draco Kill Shot.

(via travelweekly)

Progress continues on the East Side Access project.

them. The

(via tourismplacesworld dot blogspot)

One more cup of coffee.

"For to see the meaning of shadow you must transfer to the surface the awe and piety which were once reserved for the depths." --Roger Scruton, Perictione in Colophon (2000)

The New Symptom.

"They, too, o'er all th' expanded flowery earth
Waste the fair works of earth-born men, and fill
All things with eddying dust and rustling drear." --Elton's Hesiod

(via new republic)

Issue 1 remembered.

"Now I do not even know
How to live or how survive,
In these dreadful days of evil,
In this last and fleeting age.
Must I make my home in wind,
Build my walls upon the water?"

--Runo 7, Kalevala (tr Eino Friberg, 1988)

Flying in Space.

"Losing a fantasy is much harder than losing a reality."

Diagram of the Correct Shape of an Ostrich

"After [Hulagu] captured the Assassin eyrie of Maimundiz, almost the only inmate he spared was the celebrated astronomer Nasar ad-din Tusi, who had persuaded the wavering Grand Master that the planets favored surrender. To Tusi Hulagu entrusted the creation of an observatory on the plateau above Maragheh, which was soon bristling with the latest refinements of science and magic. By a pinpoint of sunlight through its dome a giant quadrant assessed the meridian altitudes of the sun, and an army of other instruments--armillary spheres, astrolabes, a dioptra for measuring the diameter of sun and moon--were built out under the stars. Even Chinese astronomers were recruited; and a library of four hundred thousand volumes, many salvaged from [the sack of] Baghdad, confirmed the observatory as the greatest of its time.

Within thirty years, using instruments more precise than those of Copernicus two centuries later, its scholars produced astronomic tables of an accuracy to supersede the calendar derived from Ptolemy. But Hulagu--addicted to alchemy and astrology--could not wait for Saturn to complete its thirty-year revolution. For him the heavens were the mind of God; they moved affairs below. And he would soon be dead. He demanded results within twelve years.

...Then the Ilkhanid dynasty fractured, and by 1340 the observatory lay in ruins. Some sixty years later, Ulug Beg, the astronomer-grandson of Tamerlane, wandered its ruins as a child, enchanted." --Shadow of the Silk Road

on a mean pyramid allow for a lossless

The cult of Triobelisk.

What attracts me about this music is how, since the revivals of synthwave have overlapped, diffused, and become mutually permeable, it's become impossible to specify the original, or the copy either, as pure, or fixed in time. All of it is now a fragrance, and a fragrance's overtones...

Creeping death from Neptune.

(via The Atlantic)

Black metal sightseeing.

I imagine leading a guided tour of the relics of what had been the 80s Dallas arts scene: there aren't any. Every building has been removed. "You stand here," i say, "and imagine it was somewhere you wanted to be."

"However, nobody seems to have taught Lojban to a newborn baby before, so I'm having to work out how to do it myself, based on advice from people raising bilingual children in other languages.."

The abjection of never being able to finish, always interrupted, continually refused any palpable closure: this as a place, a condition we are in. To find a way to inhabit it--as nomads. Haunters of the flicker-light.

"And lo-fi has a beauty and logic all of its own, which has something to do with the imperfectability of listening or hearing, or of the act of recording itself."

Carrying trash bags, in a foggy antelucan hour, out to their pickup point at the end of the driveway. A loneliness like being in the forest. Nothing to respond to.

Hardcopy Ithkuil.