Sunday, August 26, 2012

STATION IDENT 082612

Sky mavhione
sky machine by tk-link



May there be food, booze, friends, cats, book discussion, sci-fi programming, hiking, waterfalls and climbing, creative project planning, and a little bit of writing.

Litany of a Good Weekend

Sunday, August 19, 2012

STATION IDENT 081912

Aurora Jungle-Juice




TODAY

  • Thank the readers for hanging out and reading (THANK YOU!)
  • Do some writing
  • Take a Unity tutorial
  • Go out to the store and get Persona 4 Arena and learn to smash faces with the power of my internal fractured evolving divine personality constructs awwwwwww yeaaaahhhhhh~

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Our Algebra of Identity

Sample from Ehaema. For more information, please contact the author

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Rebound from one image to the next.  

Continuity of memory, the relative sense that some memories are older than others, an invisible frame now shattered, a glass table broken by the velocity of his fall through life.  This is how the world ends; we will have accelerated in our thoughts, doings, and imaginings, until we reach such a speed that the end is invisible right up until we hit it.

One thought after another; oh how we take that little miracle for granted.  Yet it is also a limit, that which forms us and diminishes us, this prison of time wherein we barely recognize one another.

If the keyhole of our awareness were but cut a little wider, how differently the light would shine upon the cells we live in.  How different we would be if we were not limited to yes or no, now or then, day or night, You or I.  How different we could be.

I if You.

We before Me, except after Thee.

Aquatic current, wet wind whips the rough moments through our algebra of identity.  The moments were a staircase, that we fell backwards down along until we reached the sea.

Kris floated through stillness, an ant in amber studying the alien terrain of the sea floor.  The strange geography of silt deposited by the dreaming currents of Drift, burrowed through by the many creatures that make their homes there, all sliding along inexorably until they are extruded from or subducted into the fiery core of the world.

All of his stairstep moments and selves formed little valleys and crenellations down there, a mosaic of self-concept that had once been a straight line. They began to flip, one after another, triangular tiles spinning on their axes, an ancient message board. Like wingbeats, like a cluster of winged creatures each beating their wings in a sequence only for you, a mesmerizing pattern of fragile wings holding back emptiness, a vast darkness revealed in the triangular spaces revealed between the small beautiful beating wings.  A series of flickered wings, grey-black-grey, and then an arc of empty spaces, moved from one side of the ocean valley floor to the other, an upside down arc that was the void’s smile, the familiar regard of a hollow place in the world.  

And Kris screamed as he saw the mask-like face revealed at the bottom of the world, the face of self-absorption, of self-delusion, of that particular madness which attends those who have no real connection, the euphoria of isolation, the alien face of Chueh Yin the Moth Prince whose followers are unspeakable in their cruelty. The face was as vast as all the earth, and it inhaled worlds with every breath as it told him to come down.

Come down, Kris.  Come home.

Sunday, August 12, 2012

STATION IDENT 081212



by Christophe Gilbert




The true alien recedes interminably even as it surrounds us completely. It is not hidden in the darkness of the outer cosmos or in the deep-sea shelf but in plain sight, everywhere, in everything. Mountain summits and gypsum beds, chile roasters and buckshot, micro-processors and ROM chips can no more communicate with us and one another than can Rescher’s extraterrestrial. It is an instructive and humbling sign. 

Speculative realism really does require speculation: benighted meandering in an exotic world of utterly incomprehensible objects. As philosophers, our job is to amplify the black noise of objects to make the resonant frequencies of the stuffs inside them hum in credibly satisfying ways. Our job is to write the speculative fictions of their processes, of their unit operations. Our job is to get our hands dirty with grease, juice, gunpowder, and gypsum. Our job is to go where everyone has gone before, but where few have bothered to linger.

I call this practice alien phenomenology. 

Ian Bogost: Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like To Be A Thing  


Sunday, August 05, 2012

STATION IDENT 080512 - Five Months In


by moleitau, via Darkly Euphoric.




Let's see.  March, April, May, June, July.  We're into August now - that means I'm closing in on the halfway mark for this project.  Let's have some quick benchmarks:


  • Over five uninterrupted months of daily weekday posting!
  • Average post lengths have nearly doubled.
  • Weekly image and music posts have crept into the schedule
  • Some Thinglink interactivity is slowly being added to images.  You can add your own links directly to them (I think)!
  • We've evolved from purely experimental collage into more of an experimental novel with continuity. 
Overall I'm really happy with how its been going.  I'm well on schedule to finish this baroque little project within the year - my next goal is actually to get far enough ahead on the daily writing that I could finish early and use part of the remaining time for editing things down into a new, more E-reader friendly format.  Call that a stretch goal - for now, I'm more than happy to just still be in the saddle, riding down (seewhatididthere?) new concepts about time, meditations on identity, and glimpses of the fantastic every week.  

After that, for the following year (you don't get rid of me that easily!), I'm looking at completing more short stories.  Maybe something like one a month - one week of plotting, two weeks of writing, and one week of cleanup?  

Finally, if you're reading this - thanks so much for coming by!  Time is precious, and life's filled with endless distractions; know that I'm grateful for each moment you choose to spend among mine.  As always, if you have a thought to share or a question or simply want to say hi, feel free to drop me a line.  The mike is yours.  And now, back to it.

--Eidolon