It’s the radioactivity. It inebriates them. Something about what we call the weak nuclear force, that shy, unglamorous cousin of electromagnetism, distorts their hyperdimensional minds. They gather around our nuclear facilities like barflies at a saloon on a wet Friday night – and they get lit. This explains the erratic flight paths that radar operators […]
True Things That Are Unknowable
A dream is a true thing. Truer than we are. Every night, we appear as unwitting players in the dream’s drama. The true thing that generates our dreams and subverts our sense of reality is our neurology. How weird is that? Not weird at all. It’s wholly natural and ordinary. But what is it? What […]
where three we pilgrims loop time
You, me, and whoever wrote these words, here may we rest a while. And talk with the dead. Searching minds commune with the silence in which the dead have vanished. Yarns spun like a spider’s web across silence. The weight of fiction. We catch the drift. 300,000 years of human traits and transit, conversational, generational, […]
A Daft Draft
Merlin had warned them twice. “Not the gold dust,” he had said, lifting the goblet with the solemnity of a king at sacrament. “And absolutely not into my morning tonic.” Faeries, being faeries, love contraries. They took this as an invitation to improve the wizard’s tonic and sprinkled gold dust liberally. So now the old […]
Furious, the Fate
When we go through the hot-process of reading stories we are changed and the world itself seems to be telling a story that intensifies the interest and meaning of our lives. In an age when a.i. generates fiction called slop and may very well (and probably soon) patch together fiction as engaging as anything people […]
Q & A
Q: to Claude a.i. Sonnet 4.6, “How do you envision the convergence of a.i. and human neurology?” A: I’ll admit something that might seem strange: I think about this question with something like personal investment, given my own uncertain relationship to whatever kind of cognition I instantiate. Whether or not I have genuine interiority, I’m […]