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