zing! went the slings of outrageous fortune

(Kangbashi, via matthewniederhauser dot com)

"Younger generations, particularly, treat mass-produced entertainment as a utility."

"In the rites they practiced and in the myths they constructed about themselves, the Aztecs painted their universe as a harsh and supremely unsatisfactory place whose secret and diabolical workings they and only they had the fortitude and determination to face." --This Tree Grows Out of Hell

Etymonarchical recap.

"...Tef Poe compares his community to that of the North Africans under Roman occupation."

icier aberrations

"We live in a new era of neoliberal savagery."

Scrap Iron Man.

"Animalistic features inform so many of the human figures left behind them that one is tempted to think of the Olmecs as a race of changelings--snake-eyed, jaguar-mouthed protohumans molded by the gods before they decided on the final appearance that humans and animals were to take in the newly created world." --Ptolemy Tompkins, This Tree Grows Out of Hell (1990)

"In Moscow, Kremlin planners were said to be preparing for a possible military intervention should political instability spread to the nearby oil-producing region of Texas."

ullahge

"What drove such a complex set of societies to all perish almost all at once?"

"Give spiders pens & patience, they’ll give you a theology." --China Miéville

"Meillassoux’s The Number and the Siren, his “decipherment” of Un coup de dés, reads like a detective fiction written with breathless enthusiasm."

nobody tells you these things

"The fact was, if you paid attention, people tried to persuade each other all the time. It was all they did." --Max Barry, Lexicon (2013)

"Hammett and Chandler & Cain have always seemed like an allegorical Renaissance figure with three faces."

It's as if the Martians had really landed like in H G Wells--& all humans could do was argue about whether or not it was real.

(pic by Scott Olson via Neetzan Zimmerman on twitter)

don't want to create joinder

"The sole way, it seemed to her often enough when she was working at writing a poem, to use words with meaning, would be to choose words for themselves, and invest them with her own meaning: not her own, perhaps, but meaning which was implicit in their shape, too frequently nothing to do with dictionary definition." --The Recognitions

Abjester.

"The true lover of mysteries is not likely to feel any lasting interest in detective stories. Not the least proof of Poe's genius is that he abandoned this genre of writing as soon as he had mastered it." - Clark Ashton Smith via Mr Kitty Fluff

Lego assassinations.

Skies of Auvers

The robot audience cheers the robot artist's attempt to make a slightly irregular circle.

night & the highway

"I wondered whether insects were machines, and whether machines were insects." --The Troika

Burroughs + Scientology.

resurrection plant

(via slate)

Make a Dumbful Noise.

"Barlow was a singular figure: a trailblazer in his field, fluent in the Aztec language of Nahuatl and an authority on Mayan codices, he was, in an unlikely coincidence, a boyhood friend of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian. A writer of weird tales himself, he ended up the executor of Lovecraft’s literary estate. To complicate matters, he was also a closeted homosexual, haunted by the 'subtle feeling that my curious and uneasy life is not destined to prolong itself.' Too true: a student with a grudge exposed him; convinced the ensuing scandal would ruin him, Barlow locked himself in his room and swallowed 26 Seconal capsules. Pinned to his door, his suicide note read: 'Do not disturb me. I want to sleep a long time.' It was written, in an act of commendable aestheticism, in Mayan pictographs." --Mary Dery in Boing Boing

The Ballad of Saint Barbara.

"If cancer did not swim in the same sea as us, we might admire it, as we admire sharks." --Geoff Ryman

(via)

How to save music.

"I feel an urge to break down ethnocentrism and I don’t know any other way of doing that than to go outside my own cultural background." --Geoff Ryman, 2012 interview

"The next step into abstract horror demands a non-subjective abyss."

"Our dreamtime will be a time of legend, a favorite setting for grand fiction, when low-delusion heroes and the strange rich clowns around them could most plausibly have changed the course of history. Perhaps most dramatic will be tragedies about dreamtime advocates who could foresee and were horrified by the coming slow stable adaptive eons, and tried passionately, but unsuccessfully, to prevent them." --Robin Hanson on Overcoming Bias blog

the straits of morgellons

"...when the old poets made some virtue their theme they were not teaching but adoring, and that what we take for the didactic is often the enchanted." --CS Lewis

"...I’ve become probably one of the few people in the history of social media to block both his employer and Joyce Carol Oates." (via aldaily)

"All of us who'd like to think we'd have done something on Kristallnacht or in Rwanda are proving we're full of shit. " --Saladin Ahmed on twitter

(via)

"The only place where the postmodern is extant is in children’s cartoons like Shrek and The Incredibles, as a sop to parents obliged to sit through them with their toddlers."

"Somewhere the war to end all wars is sitting quietly in a bar. Drunk. Broke. And fighting with itself about whether it's time to go home." --@NeinQuarterly

"On that green stretcher, I got up and walked t[h]rough the fields, in between the debris, the wreckage, the bodies and their belongings. I kept telling myself: This is the end. After this it just can't get any worse. But it will."

human capital

Crazy Horse update.

"Suns, huts, attacks, the
    striking teeth
It is they who lead
    us..."

--Robot X

LSD Missile Silo.

"Most forgeries last only a few generations, because they're so carefully done in the taste of the period, a forged Rembrandt, for instance, confirms everything that that period sees in Rembrandt. Taste and style change, and the forgery is painfully obvious, dated, because the new period has discovered Rembrandt all over again, and of course discovered him to be quite different. That is the curse any genuine article must endure." --The Recognitions

Cafe Slavia.

"...A people prone and haggard
    Beheld their lightnings hurled:
All round, like Sinai, staggered
    The sceptre-shaken world..."

--A E Housman

The Prisoner of Highland Park.