STATION IDENT 090912

Spider Skin, Carbajo Maria, FEI Company




What is it that you want to be?

Where is it that you want to be?

Why?

STATION IDENT 090212

via escolma
Tchernobyl 5, Waiting Room, Prypiat, Ukraine — Cedric Delsaux, 2007



So there's Voltech, a comedic and dapper young blogger-about-town (town being cyberspace, dapper being - probably still dapper).  And he goes and throws me into one of these sort of "questions about me" kind of meme-quiz-chainletter things, because he must defeat 11 blogs to achieve immortality, and for one reason or another he keeps reading things I write.

Clearly a madman.

Now, back in the days when people were still like "Do you use email?" rather than "What's your email?" you would get chain letters in email like all the time, instead of just cordoning that stuff off to your Facebook wall and then humanely setting it on fire.  You know which ones I mean, the ones that are all:

"Make ten wishes, post them here for everyone, then send this to ten more people within a week and the FIRST WISH ON THE LIST will come true!  Fail in this, and your soul is forfeit.  You will become a wretched shadow of a creature, having swallowed and become every single thing that you hated, but you will not be permitted to die, not until you have seen all that you love grow withered and twisted by your own hand, and every trace of your existence in this life has bled out on the universe's piss-stained bathroom floor.  IT WILL HAPPEN UNLESS YOU OBEY."

And then you'd be like, "Oh shit, I have to send this thing.  Why?  Why would my friends send me these veiled threats to comply with their groupthink or suffer?  How is that a friendly action?

Sensing a call to adventure, I became one of the world's first Chain Email Sin Eaters.  I encouraged everyone to send me their chain letters so I could purposely not forward them.  It would become my life's work to absorb and conquer all the bad karma spread by those viral memes.  The sender would be absolved, and I would wrestle with whatever demons attacked me as a consequence.  And I did.  But that is a tale for another day.

Because of my sacred duties, I am actually sort of terrible at self-promotion, you know?  It's the cross I bear.  But what I can do without violating the tenets of my order, is to post a list of bloggers on Blogger blogging bloggy blogs that I think you should check out.  Here is your menu; please enjoy, and let me know if you need anything.

Into Survival by Joey Comeau.  Horrifyingly good.
Los Angeles Post Punk.  Smell the nihilism, enjoy the tunes.
We Are Respectable Negroes by Chauncey.  Tastefully presented meditations on race.
Lost Garden.  Game theory, affordably priced.
Copyranter.  Making fun of commercials has always been a favorite pastime.  Why did I start this menu metaphor anyway?  It's seriously not working.  It was a bad idea.
DDS Translations.  Not currently updating, but probably the only existing translation of the Digital Devil Story Japanese novel, so if you're that kind of person, there you go.
Fashion and Action.  Comics and Costumes.
Cross-Up by Voltech.  Contains game discussion, fiction, natural flavors, coloring, and awesome sauce.
Shapescapes by Konstantine Paradias.   A specialty from Greece!  Science fiction, comics, and pontificating.
Invisible Kidz by Gabriel.  Portraits in art and text, in blue glaze with a little bit of bite.
LoOaSt Character List by Tam.  She's cooking up a new world.  Please enjoy.

STATION IDENT 082612

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

STATION IDENT 081912

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~

Our Algebra of Identity

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

---

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.

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  

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

The Cult of Organic

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

---

"Oh totally!  So I got this stuff the other day, check it out," Kalli replied, tossing the errant legs aside, dashing into the kitchen, and returning with ziplocked packages for Alex to examine before passing around.

"Organic Turkey Bologna and Organic American Cheese, huh?"  

"Are you part of the cult of Organic now?" asked Drew.  

"All the food is organics!  That’s why we eat it, motherfuckerrrrrrrrrr!"  chimed in Vanya, raising a fist to the air before letting it fall back into the beanbag chair he’d melted into.

"Listen to the ingredients.  'No antibiotics used (Turkey never administered antibiotics or animal by-products. Vegetarian grain-fed). Not preserved. No nitrites or nitrates added (Except for those naturally occurring in sea salt). Humanely raised (Turkey raised on sustainable family farms in a stress-free environment that promotes natural behavior and socialization). Gluten & casein free. Inspected for wholesomeness by US Department of Agriculture. Fully cooked. We're anti-antibiotics.'"

"This describes the Cult of Organic in a nutshell,” laughed Jenny.  “A fucking hundred word essay to explain how turkeys are basically shoved into a tube and excreted as paste to be bound into stomach-casing tubes for us to bite into, in as humane, friendly, and poetic a manner as possible."

"They're vegetarian turkeys!" beamed Alex.

"They make your heart happy," added Kalli.

"Seems like it would actually make more sense to chow down on the carnivorous turkeys out there,” mumbled Vanya after a moment’s thought.  “Head off that threat before it begins, you know what I'm saying?"  

“Deadly turkeys!”

“Fear the turkocalypse!”  

“One day we’ll discover that they can use tools, and then it’ll be too late.  They’ll gobble us to death, one by one, and stuff us for Thanksgiving dinner.”

“My bologna has a first name, it’s GOBBLE GOBBLE MOTHERFUCKER!”  

“It’s the circle of life.  We all consume.”

“Who’s gonna help me beat this boss?”

“Drew, you’re up.”

“I can’t fight without beer!”

The clarity of the pictured room dissolved, taking with it laughter and light, and Kris was once more alone in the dark.  

STATION IDENT 072912

Robert Buelteman's Kirlian Photography, via LikeCool.





Michio Kaku: I work in something called String Theory, that’s what I do for a living. In fact, that’s my day job. I’m the co-founder of String Field Theory, one of the main branches of String Theory. The latest version of String Theory is called M-Theory, “M” for membrane. So we now realize that strings can coexist with membranes. So the subatomic particles we see in nature, the quarks, the electrons are nothing but musical notes on a tiny vibrating string.

What is physics? Physics is nothing but the laws of harmony that you can write on vibrating strings. What is chemistry? Chemistry is nothing but the melodies you can play on interacting vibrating strings. What is the universe? The universe is a symphony of vibrating strings. And then what is the mind of God that Albert Einstein eloquently wrote about for the last 30 years of his life? We now, for the first time in history have a candidate for the mind of God. It is, cosmic music resonating through 11 dimensional hyperspace.

So first of all, we are nothing but melodies. We are nothing but cosmic music played out on vibrating strings and membranes. Obeying the laws of physics, which is nothing but the laws of harmony of vibrating strings. But why 11? It turns out that if you write a theory in 15, 17, 18 dimensions, the theory is unstable. It has what are called, anomalies. It has singularities. It turns out that mathematics alone prefers the universe being 11 dimensions.

Source: BigThink

STATION IDENT 072212

Re:  "Splinter"
“You know, as humans, we devise this supposed way of being above nature. And even with the level of privilege and comfortability we have in our society, it’s almost like we’re trying to eradicate pain altogether,” she says of the song’s origins. “The idea that we must suffer to be alive is unacceptable to us almost. If we are a group of people who refuse to feel pain and the pain of existence, somebody else has to feel double, you know? And that’s the natural law."

-- Ani Difranco, Relix interview 2012

STATION IDENT 071512

by Francoise Gamma

 

Phase 1 (2012)  -  Develop resistance to "writersblock" virus through controlled daily exposure:  36%
Phase 2 (2013): - Evolve critical / analytic skill necessary for full novel revision:  0%
Phase 3 (ongoing) - Learn to propagate coded meditations on Story across the thoughtscape:  10%
Phase 4 - Profit: LOL%

STATION IDENT 070812

via DETHJUNKIE







“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

-- Carl Jung

STATION IDENT 070112

Source:  Francesca Dalla Benetta







fulldamage ‏@fulldamage
Nomads sprint ahead to the power outlets, fighting for dominance. The airport ecosystem is merciless. #unitedairlines

fulldamage ‏@fulldamage
Flocks of small children have begun circling the caravan, screaming CAW CAW and picking off the stragglers. #unitedairlines

fulldamage ‏@fulldamage
2+ hour delay, 6 gate relocations. passengers formed a traveling caravan in search of any accurate info. Killing it today, #unitedairlines

The Widderschynnes Dance

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

---

In the days before the red rain fell, and the harbingers came to lay waste to everything wonderful and everything good, there had lived a strong hunter who lived with her siblings in the sheltered heart of the Grove.

She was the youngest, but also the quickest of eye and the sharpest of nose, and when the day’s eye closed and Mother Twilight spread her skirts over the land and blushed, then the strong young hunter rose with her brethren to search the world for love and food.  

For the day’s eye judged them hotly, and in its burning gaze, the sky kings could hide and strike at them like lightning.  The deep reaches of the night, with their mazing foxfire and hordes of watchful lurkers, were no better.  So their day was the breadth of Mother Twilight’s bosom, while the kings went to sleep and the hordes were yet to rise.  Wise travelers moved past the Groves quickly if the day were on the wane, and no foraging creature lingered long outside at that time.  To see the widderschynnes dance of a flight of hunters, even in the distance, was to see death in buzzing wings and needle fangs and shrieking laughter.

During full day the winged hunters slept, and during the full night they bided in the shelter of the Grove, whispering secrets and singing songs, and painting each other with the juice of strange fruits of phosphorescent colors that have long since left the lexicon of light.  It is said that the oldest among them formed cocoons and slept within them for nine years, though no one agreed on what shape the creatures took when they finally emerged.  Of all this, little is known and less is certain, and dwellers of the day have long since dismissed the tale as a fanciful lie from the dwellers of the night.

But in the between times, when the Moon looked over her shoulder at the world below, the hunters would see her and hear her song, and they would find their second nature.  We all have a second nature, hidden right behind the first, where we cannot see it.  For the hunters, twilight was a doorway with intractable gravity.  Every day like clockwork, it led them into a world divided very simply into things to ignore, and things that would be warm and good when sliding down the gullet.

STATION IDENT 062412

Source:  Asylum Art




Headed off the map this week.  Time to get a little bit ahead.  Everybody I talk to is under pressure lately.  If you are too, try not to burn your neighbor when you vent.  Go outside, open your head to the sky, let it all come up, and then let it go.  And if you need me, look for me at the airport bar.  Sometimes you just gotta fly.

A Kinetic Poem

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

---

The strike was a thing of beauty.  Smaller’s four arms (there were four currently; the daemons’ forms were as fluid as thought) unfolded and reconvened to describe a perfect sphere, spiraling into being from non-equidistant points.  As Larger stared rapt at the moon for which he longed, Smaller fluttered into place behind him like the shadow of a leaf falling from a tree.  And the Lattice moved with him.

His micro-kata generated a current within the tides of information; thoughts and concepts were drawn into a vortex of meaning, flooding into the negative space between his hands.  The Notions that moved were obscured by the patterns that Larger was creating; Smaller deftly took advantage of this blind spot.

It was more than a blow; it was a kinetic poem.  A strike of meaning.  An input in the Command Language. Merely to see it was to have one’s awareness excited, accelerated, so that a motion quicker than a blink looked slow and liquid.  For an infinite instant, Smaller was a dancer striking a pose for the crowd.

When he struck, two arms burst wide and two others thrust forward, magnifying and projecting the invisible sphere simultaneously.  And the Lattice struck with him.

“You”

“Are”

“Wrong”

it said.

The rebuttal scattered Larger across the sky.  

STATION IDENT - 061712

Etienne-Jules Marey, Air Movement Study, 1901. 




We've found a match.  An echo frequency located in the same star cluster.

Tracing its point of origin to - Paradias.

Stand by for data analysis.  Please align your perceptions and begin scanning.

STATION IDENT 061012

Green Abyss by bRokEnCHaRacTer




In the dream, you're at work on a weekend, and everything is dark although in weekday land, reality-land, you know it's always kept well-lit.  There are voices describing an abstract problem behind you, and you're distracted because you're sort of listening to them but also working on something even though you're supposed to be working on something else.  It's a dream, because you're eating fast food, which is something you did a lot when you were younger, but now you never do.

On the screen is a spreadsheet full of codes that are english in some columns and nonsense hash tags in others.  There's another window.  You click on one thing, it's a picture.  You click on another thing, it's a song that you remember liking, that begins to take the shape of the words in your head.  Which as you realize it, becomes you typing words directly.  

That's when you realize you're dreaming.

that's when you realize you're awake

Through Fields of Light and Reverie

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

---

The interior of Halliday’s house existed in the same time-bubble that its owner did.  The furniture was largely deco; glass and plastic surfaces accompanied a variety of chunky, rounded furniture in whites or light pastels, and Nagel, Basquiat, and Warhol held pastel court upon the walls.  

The walls were alternately black or white; the carpet was white shag.  The severe lines of a parallelogram couch were attended by the rounded forms of beanbags and an exercise ball, and the entire arrangement played perspective tricks with the eye depending on where one stood.  As opposed to the chaotic swirl of the duplex, where new arrangements and newly scavenged furniture arrived and evolved on a weekly basis, the composition of this living area bespoke an obsession with precision, light and order.

Time lapsed as they passed through the space.  The ghosts of party moved, snuggled, and staggered through the room; shadows curled up on couches, laughed at bygone jests, smoked reflectively in the corners and sprawled indolently across the floor.  People came together.  People came apart.  Day became night became day, filtered through the glass doors leading to the pool area and the cultivated, concreted desert beyond.  

The sun became the moon became the sun, and when daylight failed, colored light fixtures were born from recessed alcoves and ceiling tracks, causing the monochrome elements to bloom into technicolor dreamscapes.  Green pastoral chairs grew under azure skies; golden tables beamed resplendent under lavender ceilings; laval orange carpets cooled under the blackest horizons, and within all of these scenarios were a host of partiers, actors playing roles that were older than they felt, and younger than they looked.   

They walked amongst the living room fixtures, through fields of light and reverie, and remembered things that other people dreamt, and saw things that they did not see.

The garage was another realm entirely.  

STATION IDENT 060412

via Machine Like Vengeance



My main computer has been in revolt over the weekend.  And while I never promised anybody a weekly Station ID as part of the package - I find I quite enjoy the rhythm of them.

To a week of problem resolution. Load up and move out.