( via / via )

"As I discovered, it is a) often visually stunning, and b) absolutely crackers."

gigantomachy gawker
   ghoul toolkit
foaming-up wastebasket
   wisp busker

wisteria church spire
   splotch eyewear
subfusc foible-eater
   fancy stance

to the horizon shells
   crunch-trudging
a skull tells this story
   to the stunned wind

Keyboard Fantasies.

"In 2016, 33EMYBW and fellow Shanghai-based electronic music producer Gooooose spent two weeks in the remote Guizhou village of Xiao Huang, immersing themselves in the culture of the Dong, a people renowned for their folk songs. From the field recordings they made during this time, two albums emerged: Dong1 and Dong2." —@jakenewby via

"We’re much more comfortable condemning evil presidents and greedy corporations than being told that we’re complicit in the system we’re criticizing..."

( via / via )

"It still may come as a surprise to some that 'rape free' is even a possibility."

"...it’s as if the burnouts of the 1960s split into two tribes where one decided to surf and hike and ended up in Santa Cruz & Marin, while the others who liked to ski and hike ended up in Manitou Springs & Vail." —Phil B via

55(?) Chevy Bel Air Nomad.

      "XXXVI

West and away the wheels of darkness roll,
   Day's beamy banner up the east is borne,
Spectres and fears, the nightmare and her foal,
   Drown in the golden deluge of the morn.

But over sea and continent from sight
   Safe to the Indies has the earth conveyed
The vast and moon-eclipsing cone of night,
   Her towering foolscap of eternal shade.

See, in mid heaven the sun is mounted; hark,
   The belfries tingle to the noonday chime.
'Tis silent, and the subterranean dark
   Has crossed the nadir, and begins to climb."

—AE Housman, Last Poems

Coming to the Call.

( me / via )

The Student of Prague. (Online, colorized.)

"I broadcast white noise

I broadcast white noise;
alas, white is not a thing. Regret
whitewashes hindsight.
Smoke stings silk. Sweetness is like
whiteness. Screams: Don’t do it!
It is I! Be sweet dark dear!"

—Unica Zürn via

Grok please do an extremely vulgar roast.

Everyone smoked.
Everyone used plastics.

The valley of ashes.

( via / via )

"The nursing home cantastoria fills..."

"Jesters can only be slain if it's funny. They are engaged in perpetual war, and thirst for the blood of other clowns. They grow a bell on their hat for every kill" —@ctrlcreep.bsky.social

Drone "Cthulhu".

what world
ago was it
did not fear its food or
an unmarked van slow driving down
the street

8 years ago.

( via / via )

"Ideas are the engines of history, and ideas never quite die."

   we are all half crazed
in the full gloom · splintery
   expedients spawn

strange prohibitions of words
that once had simple meanings

"For when people do you an injury they always slander you afterwards."

Raku may be the single most beautiful art medium humans have found.

Never in history has there been a war ...

( nightcafe / via )

Joy.

"Paul McCartney earns 93% of his income from touring. Only 7% comes from the songs that made him the most famous songwriter alive." —@mdemarco via

In Bed with Art.

"Metal Breach

black sand
no gulls
just iron filings in the air
harbour water yellow with tannery drain
a dead battery bubbling in the bilge
taste of tin
eyes soured
throat salted
the water doesn't wash
it stains"

—@thedevilstuna.bsky.social

The Peasants’ War Cycle.

( via / me )

Thrift.

Sligo, Slidell, argyle
slant-told homecoming
      midnight doors
   could not stay me
a thouand deaths
(moist gulag)
Sligo, Slidell, argyle
(gulag moist)

Inverted poetries.

We argue diction in the shadow of the gibbet.

Why He was There.

( me / via )

"Over the course of the summer, ICE detained more than one person per minute."

"Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to prosecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing." —Vaclav Havel, in The Power of the Powerless (1978) via @markchristian135924

In 1925 fashion designer Sonia Delaunay customised her Citroen B12 to match her clothing.

tiltdecantative hent
heinous drudgery adjunct
       shadows i
   mistake for bugs
coolth lethargy · though eyes mended

margin short mammals
emerge with cruel alertness
       these grays sing
   gruesome of storm
broken tower · testament in the cards

"What they did with the music was extraordinary – take the roughness and DIY element, and use that to create heavy music that was for the first time beautiful as well as dark – but what they did with the symbolism was horrific..."

( me / via )

"I have come to appreciate execution’s place in our national life. It’s an heirloom of doubtful value."

“George Crabbe

Give him the darkest inch your shelf allows,
Hide him in lonely garrets, if you will,—
But his hard, human pulse is throbbing still
With the sure strength that fearless truth endows.
In spite of all fine science disavows,
Of his plain excellence and stubborn skill
There yet remains what fashion cannot kill,
Though years have thinned the laurel from his brows.

Whether or not we read him, we can feel
From time to time the vigor of his name
Against us like a finger for the shame
And emptiness of what our souls reveal
In books that are as altars where we kneel
To consecrate the flicker, not the flame."

—Edwin Arlington Robinson

"At the time it was written, there was still a firewall between the rock and classical worlds."

"In what may turn out to be one of the most prescient pieces of sci-fi ever made, the movie posits a superintelligent AI called the Entity, which monkeys with PLC systems making it impossible for humans to trust any information that comes to them digitally." —Jonathan V Last via

"He painted his bedroom walls red vermillion to test if it would make him go mad."

( via / me )

Illegible Writings.

"The segments of a jester's cap are its "true arms" (distinguished from its false, humanoid arms). They are used for tasting the air, manipulating prey, and intra-clown communication"
—@ctrlcreep.bsky.social

"If the dream is a writing system...."

shamefastness blurred
prowlwood chore
loom spawn
oily idyll garb

Helicopter String Quartet.

( via / via )

No Land to Stand On. (Mefi thread)

"Moths

They speak of having been condemned
for crimes committed in some other
world—for torturing a lover
perhaps, for cuckolding a friend

Their penance is to fling themselves
against the lesser lights of Earth,
then freeze against the wall in fear
like haunted Midases of silver

Of silver—yes, the moths have touched
your eye for lustre, the fly-by-night;
as though they bribed you to admit
the wrongs that saw your own wings crushed"

—@huckastley

Weird Literary Novels.

"If through excessive weakness we can neither call forth pity nor do harm to others, we attack what the universe itself represents for us. Then every good or beautiful thing is like an insult." —Simone Weil via

The Occulted Paintings of Robert Lenkiewicz.

( me / via )

"Duplex presents a setting that feels like ordinary American suburbia, except that things called “scows” keep drifting through the sky, and everyone references some major past event called the 'Rain of Beads'."

“ ‘How do you explain the thousands of books that come out every year?’

'I do not explain them. There seems to me to be no explanation.’ ”

—@IComptonBurnett

Hourglass-pent.

"how to lose the oil war"

pale horsemen's hooves
shut eyes barrage

how soon these
joys shall fall

As-if on some throughline.

( via / via )

Taking the Keys Away from Grandpa.

ransom,
Resonulo,
out of all the unseen
Borgesian roses one that
bites back

Spot the bun.

"The fact of the matter is that America is the most powerful and wealthy civilization in the history of the world, yet a great many of its citizens spend an inordinate amount of time surrounded on all sides by cheap drywall and drop ceilings, along with the ever-present headache inducing buzz of fluorescent lights... and in these spaces largely useless tasks are performed, often under surveillance, hour after hour, day after day. " —Aaron Lange via

THE MOST HEAT EXTREME EVENT THE WORLD HAS EVER SEEN.

A guy filmed a Soyuz launch from a distance so close it should be impossible, since safety zones usually clear the pad for kilometers around.

[image or embed]

— Digital Brain (@yourdigitalbrain.bsky.social) October 2, 2026 at 7:12 AM

( via / via )

Limits (or Good-byes).

Some of us golf, some of us putt-putt.

I hate to say this, but that's kind of awesome.

gibbous
our derangement
ask clanker clarify
what will become of these wights so
carbon

You win the internet today!

We used to make so much cool stuff with our hands

[image or embed]

— Solomon (@solomonrmissouri.com) October 1, 2026 at 8:00 AM

( me / via)

One of Ensor's Masks.

moon split
in the black sky
like the sura foretold
a thing that never happened to
earthlings

"I was the managing editor of The Atlantic when we published this article. It ultimately led to the end of my career..."

"Lionesses keep the male lions in check out in the wild. I’d love to see women doing similar things here in society." —@mouthyrenegade.bsky.social via

The School that Became a Grave.

( me / via )

"The author/artist who is the subject of dethroning is a stand-in for some larger transgression."

"John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett were all on GWBush 2000 'Florida Recount' team." —@jfallows.bsky.social

"The Calvinists' biggest mistake was that they were insufficiently fatalistic."

form, the
pentagram that
can capture a spirit
or with its vacancy evoke
Maya

"In 1946, Germany ran out of Nazis."

( via / me )

"No, I am not nestled comfortably in my given lifeworld, or any particular sect at all, but have rather dawned the metaphorical2 trench coat of the spiritual gumshoe and adopted an investigator’s approach to the divine, appreciating the colors, but still compelled by something to glimpse the White Light itself.."

cold, limp
the honey toast
the hospital served me
yet it was a first glimmer
of home

"Another day spent fruitlessly searching for the Black Library in Weychester Cathedral."

"It really says something when both of my therapists are saying that the sense of dread is fully justified and the best I can do is tune out what isn't an immediate threat to my well being."
—@gnome-artificer.bsky.social

HOLDMESE / MOON FLIGHT (1975).

( via / via )

Henry Ossawa Tanner's The Angel of Death Following Two Lovers.

"In scenes that are far too reminiscent of a Patricia Highsmith short story for my liking, it turns out that our dishwasher was broken by a slug - yes, a slug - climbing in through the external waste pipe and then sitting on the motherboard." —@rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social

New definition of surrealism just dropped.

Oh. wow. Another sonnet.

trill ghosts
haunt our halfway
unregarding tree-lined
repositories of parked cars
today

Five Vintage Fountain Pens for Beginners.

( via / via )

"For those curious about Cervantes’s autobiographical verse plays about his time in Algiers (a source text for my historical novel forthcoming next year, Cervantes in Chains), this is a modern English translation."

the day
shrouded & wet
asudden · elsewhere floods
are tugging parked cars awry, here
green throbs

Authored first full-length Manx language novel.

"Because of the difficulty of obtaining whale song and the absolute proliferation of birds, scientists are shifting their attention toward the actual language of the birds." —Damon Rolnick via

Cubist Cthulhu.

( via/ me )

"And Now I Know It."

It’s hard to square re-enchantment with generational trauma.

Leaves.

"that's so agentic"

maddest October
without any help from me
dashboard lights embellish
labyrinth of Ixtab
chess grognard grass-fed
& graying rogue mogul

"In 1994, a scholar named Deborah Harkness was researching her doctoral thesis on John Dee’s conversations with angels. She was working through dense British Library scans, following the paper trail of Dee’s documented conversations, and she came across a strange uncatalogued manuscript."

( via / via )

Texas. Not what you think!

blood bus'ness
zarf
rotkohl spiel

moon-mad aisle
loud woods
stage voice

If i had to do it over again i'd be a puppeteer in Prague.

"Automated moderating has decided that Artemisia Gentileschi's Susanna and the Elders is adult content." —@evacide.bsky.social

"That sentence is so peak 2026." —@rebeccasolnit.bsky.social (thread)

"At first light each had to find their own again and put it on. The word for that morning is kinuginu 後朝, once written 衣衣. ."

( via / via )

That time i wanted to write Old English in runes.

"One thing not living in America has made really hit home is how much truly global cultural dominance is a thing of the past. I have not heard 'Choosing Texas' once in the urban Western European wild, I could not hum a single bar of it if you put a gun to my head. 40 years ago we had uncontacted island tribes full of Michael Jackson fans. It is more over than we can possibly imagine." —@ellecarroll

Ausonius' Nuptial Cento translated.

   “Song

I make my shroud but no one knows,
So shimmering fine it is and fair,
With stitches set in even rows.
I make my shroud but no one knows.

In door-way where the lilac blows,
Humming a little wandering air,
I make my shroud and no one knows,
So shimmering fine it is and fair.”

—Adelaide Crapsey

The skull is not optional.

( via / via )

I've always had a soft spot for yogh.

"CAESAR

My shoes are almost dead
And as I wait at the doors of ice
I hear the cry go up for him Caesar Caesar

But when I look out the window I see only the flatlands
And the slow vanishing of the windmills
The centuries draining the deep fields

Yet this is still my country
The thug on duty says What would you change
He looks at his watch he lifts
Emptiness out of the vases
And holds it up to examine

So it is evening
With the rain starting to fall forever
One by one he calls night out of the teeth
And at last I take up
My duty

Wheeling the president past banks of flowers
Past the feet of empty stairs
Hoping he's dead"

—WS Merwin

Some of the bigger fountain pen makers and their flagship pens.

It used to be accepted wisdom that the best poets were the earliest, & perhaps one day we will say this about film.

I don’t mind computer-made work that advertizes itself as such. I like elephant art & monkey art, too.

( via / via )

"...Ani DiFranco, whose folk has always had a punk’s bite, in songs where the personal and political are seldom on speaking terms with polite society. With Scot Fisher, her longtime manager and then president of Righteous Babe Records, she saved and restored a Gothic Revival church, turning it into the music venue Babeville."

"The Heian court, which could have had anything, named one of its colours kuchiba 朽葉. Rotting leaves. A dull brown-yellow, the colour of a path in November. Murasaki Shikibu dresses people in it. So does Sei Shōnagon. And because one word for decay was not enough, it came in three. Aka-kuchiba, the leaf gone red. Ki-kuchiba, gone yellow. Ao-kuchiba, the leaf that has begun to turn and still has green in it." —Renares via

Henri Michaux almost never dated his works....To solve the riddle of his artistic legacy, the expert committee currently preparing his catalogue raisonné had to design a custom software applying cognitive sciences and algorithms to map all the ink gestures and paper batches.

“The courage that my mother had
Went with her, and is with her still:
Rock from New England quarried:
Now granite in a granite hill.

The golden brooch my mother wore
She left behind for me to wear;
I have no thing I treasure more:
Yet, it is something I could spare.

Oh, if instead she’d left to me
The thing she took into the grave—
That courage like a rock, which she
Has no more need of, and I have.”

—Millay

"The twenty-four names describe a particular place — the basin of a river in northern China, at a latitude and in a dry continental climate that is not this wet archipelago strung along an ocean two thousand kilometers away.

So the names arrive already wrong."

( me / via )

Carapace.

"At Denicija’s grave
На гробот од Дениција

”Longing for her, I often sit in her shadow…” - Old Testament

Above me a grey cloud and a grey eagle
are discussing something,

and I think they're tipping you off
about me, Denicija.

Because whenever I saw a tower and a noonday poplar,
they were like your figure, Denicija.

Whenever I encountered the swelter of day and the swaying of wheat,
they were like your hair, Denicija.

Whenever I discovered a sunflower and a backlit embrasure,
they were like your eyes, Denicija.

Whenever I came across a sunset, whenever I cut a watermelon,
they were like your mouth, Denicija.

And all the measured multures, all the Kantarka pears
were like your breasts, Denicija.

Whenever a sweet and unfurled wing passed me by,
they were like your eyelashes, Denicija.

Whenever I plucked a piece of straw and an olive branch,
they were like your fingers, Denicija.

Whenever I opened a window and an unread book,
they were like your blouse, Denicija.

And all the abandoned spurs and stirrups
were like your earrings, Denicija.

Whenever I heard of raging hills and seas,
they were like your hips, Denicija.

Whenever I saw dandelions and ploughshares,
they were like your feet, Denicija.

And I saw what I saw, and I saw nothing
because all day long I ascend upon the souls of the dead,
all day long I descend through the rain and mist
and everywhere I arrive I'm always too late to reach you.

Afterwards I stand frozen, waiting where I think you'll pass by
and I leave every city gate standing open
at all times so that you can come back.

You peer out at me from both heaven and earth,
and in no way can I manage to tell you
that my death too began after yours
and that it is blessed to live, but even more blessed to die,
thinking only of you, Denicija."

—Petre M. Andreevski via

Never shall I forget that smoke.

"So, for example, when Bell lifts the veil off the mystery of the puddles through the device of Seathorpe’s own mad scientist’s journal, we are moving along through the preliminaries of the man’s life up to the point he began attempting to create life (using some form of electrolysis, it turns out) when we take a left and wander down a five page detour about the evils of flogging..." —Neglected Books via

Alas.

( via / via )

Emperor moth.

I fall into easy habits of browsing Substack, blogging, curating images; hours go by this way. It's just like an interminable session in the doctor's waiting room, in which all the magazines have been read over twice. We all are waiting for the Midterms, or Krasnov's cheeseburgers to clog his heart, or some other deus ex machina we don't really believe in. Stories would lead us to dream that six months from now all the Blue Meanies will be overthrown. By what, i ask. By more severe consequences.

Georgian monuments.

"dinkum Hakenkreuz"

strands of realer things
but why give them the say-so
flavors flowing earthward

reflections of glass towers
the story sternly spurned
strands of realer things

far from the tall tumult
skeletons of gaunt grief
but why give them the say-so

why among fluorescents
& intangible ballast
flavors flowing earthward

Thristclangor splinterhymn.

Here it comes... the large coronal hole is almost directly facing Earth now, which means fast solar wind is 3-4 days away. In fact, NOAA SWPC has just issued a G1/minor storm watch for Oct 2. This means there are chances for mid-latitude auroral displays Thu and Fri nights. #heliophysics

[image or embed]

— Vincent Ledvina (@vincentledvina.bsky.social) September 29, 2026 at 12:44 PM

( via / via )

Gender neutrality in languages with gendered third-person pronouns.

werewolf antheap
watch slow loom
poising ark

whiteout deadweight

"I have separated the art from the artist..." (thread)

"I wound up looking at over one hundred ceiling fans for this small blog post, and I’m sure you’re all wondering which one is my favorite. I have to say it’s the 'Hanke 36.22' 6- Speed Dimmable Reversible Ceiling Fan With Led Lights And Remote Control" ($167)" —Kate Wagner via

I only know that summer sang in me.