Fun German political parade floats.
Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians.
"Popular culture’s designed by a highly-trained popular culture elite"
- Momus, The Philosophy of Momus via @jacobwren.bsky.social
Wednesday, February 18, 2026
"when you see the discourse of the day unfolding but you can't figure out the source so it's like dark matter that can only be observed by its effect on its surroundings" —@tomtomorrow.bsky.social
"harvest moon
over Gold Mountain Diner --
a migrant and I
eat and chat around the edges
of our lost dreams"
—Chen-ou Liu
Onions in Moonlight: TSA Members' Anthology, 2025 via @evecastle.bsky.social
Tuesday, February 17, 2026
"P.S.
I close my eyes and see
a seagull in the desert,
high, against unbearably blue sky.
There is hope in the past.
I am writing to you
all the time, I am writing
with both hands,
day and night."
—Franz Wright via @zeeshanpathan.bsky.social
"My favourite fact about Iceland is that we have many, many crime writers but only one forensic pathologist, and he was so busy answering all of their questions that he decided to have a small seminar for writers to get some peace.
It immediately sold out so he had another one that also sold out." —@hildur.bsky.social
Ken Paxton and the First Amendment.
They raided the jailed children to steal their letters.
"RFK looks like a Joseph Beuys sculpture of Ted Kennedy." —@stardaddy.bsky.social
L'Arc de Triomphe, Winter Morning, Early 20th Century.
"great reptile skytrain"
pale saffron the lean-to
train is crossing shadowed
fadge some likely rescue
snowcapped & face Rushmore
pale saffron the lean-to
Nothing going on in that sloppy rubble but the trümmerfrauen.
"Is Haidilao discriminating against doll owners?"
"Charybdis & Charybdis"
polychrome nightmare
retrieving a word
unthought of for decades
a slender parting
the maze grows denser with echoes
A hillside near Gaucin, Andalucia.
The definition of "person" has changed so many times in my lifetime it's not funny.
"I felt a little sick watching AI Christmas commercials too, but I'm sick of hearing every single thing produced using AI dismissed as 'AI slop,' as if anything that uses AI at all is just as bad as that video of Trump dumping on protesters from his little poopy-jet." (Mefi thread) --Also: "This is Star Trek tech that fell in our laps at just about the worst possible moment, when our leaders are lunatics who are building concentration camps for brown people."
"Umm Erak Palimpsest" is the name of my next band.
"NINETEEN SIXTY-NINE (Aelindrome in 1969)
Near the moodless heavens.
Landless, hear the Moon.
1969691 =
[N]1[ear the moo]9[dless h]6[eavens.
Lan]9[dless, h]6[ear the Moo]9[n]1."
—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social
From Chamber Music. The whole album is miraculous.
"WHAT'S A HAIKU? (Anagrammed Lines)
Basically, the paced
heptadecasyllabic
blade; a patchy slice."
—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social
"There's a German word for that, Backpfeifengesicht" —@arthurzin.bsky.social
"vestibule of the cesspool"
cheongsam spree, descriptive
stringer fending westward
surge. boots on the bare tarmac
a bodyguard of quagmires
these and like followed. Fillmore wept
affordances of cisgend
ersatz arsine
amber alert snirtle
alert snirtle
"Seeing that it’s National Cabbage Day, here’s Flaubert, in a letter to Louise Colet (1853):
'It is too generally believed that the sun has no other function here below than to help the cabbages along.' " —@lattaj.bsky.social
Monday, February 16, 2026
How completely the normies have been mobilized.
"Writing fiction is the exact opposite of a get-rich-quick scheme." —@ashleyzachariah.bsky.social
the riddle learns loudness
realize haze whisper
fork it over archangel
anytime. fair's fair in
this fierce swirl of warsmoke
sentimental marksman
much manacled buckram
The Sagrada Família Basilica in the background, 24 years into its construction.
Best version of "Strained on Strange" (4:44-12:26).
Insights are sparser than meteorites.
"The books were not numbered sequentially, but rather in relation to the numerology of the buyer.."
carriage stiffness · the smell of hot dust
smeary Jupiter · black & white projection
on the Grand Tour
a chunk of my lifetime · never miles so grand
songs of incense · & patchouli
& other dreams burned
Fillmore · Mylanta & the leatherbound
Stanyhurst · the steel rails still
haven't heard the news
as you plummet
Why am i thinking of Dr Phibes right now?
The overthrow of parity is the most important philosophical development of the last 1000 years. Several essays that begin Dr A's The Left Hand of the Electron. (I know he's kind of cancelled now, but this is when i was growing up. --I note he mentions Yang & Lee, but not Wu...until p.22 when he does.)
"Tyvek healthscare"
lozenge tribe, shape's libel
louche in the yegg segments
unshadowed ride rattled
no river mole shivers
watchful with worn corners
bewails day of staying
the fake background bakeoff
“It is in sickness that we are compelled to recognise that we do not live alone but are chained to a being from a different realm, from whom we are worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.
But to ask pity of our body is like discoursing in front of an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the tides, and with which we should be appalled to find ourselves condemned to live.”
(The Guermantes Way, trans. Scott Moncrieff et al.) via @yoonkim.bsky.social
"The voice in the poem is not your friend."
- Sean Bonney via @johannesg.bsky.social
An aggressive ant colony reduces.
"MATHEMATICS OF A FROZEN LAKE
(Palindrome-Haiku)
Slam ice, dynamic.
A bad loch: Cold abaci —
Many decimals."
—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social
I stumble over a typo in the second paragraph, cuz i'm a close reader :).
"Legitimation Crisis"
Arcane i ever sought defining texture
Where things around me drummed belittled gospel.
Bumpersticker luck, a few museums:
Only on the road did beauty ravel
A sleepless night of hitching, highway nowhere,
And field of wheat at sunrise richly reeking.
"Me as a child: it must be very hard to become a CEO and be very hard work once you get the job
Guy obviously on drugs speaking at a conference: the next five years of the economy should be about a dream I had where a dog spoke to me" —@brendelbored.bsky.social
I only pose next to demolished buildings.
Posted out of sheer mirey flabbergastedness.
“Volsunga”
In the hoarse honking · of the geese I hear
Plots to kill me · plans for mayhem
Their sky traceries · tremblingly write
How it’s too late · leave from these cursed surroundings
Their sad cries · repeated on the cruel air
"Whole dead animals with slick fur and no eyes."
Sunday, February 15, 2026
"The swartferry"
"These days sometimes I feel my life
is like a river running through
the Year of the Cat"
—Al Stewart
flashdrive with edges & filigree
folds Rasolnikov up
beige granola turquoise
bowl not the cup's teal
tyrannous horizon
of my rooting bildoogie
the empty place fallow
like a snow covered parking lot
The story of the Pale Blue Dot.
"Did you know that strawberries are not berries, and are actually mammals?"
—@alyankovic.bsky.social
"Most optimistic I feel about anything is when I recall that it was way harder to get to where US is now from where it started than it will be to get to where we need to go from where we currently are.
It’s largely a matter of decolonizing our minds now. That’s why they wanna control what we see."
—@otsumamiboy.bsky.social
"Stechschritt"
redbrick Delphi, dither
the leaf dance of fancy
barbed wire in the wheelwells
my contrail wisp daunting
nothing so nab-curbside
in the quidnunc monkdom
gullwing days that gutter
United States of America (1968).
merle stabilimenta
subfusc amass castles
bright shelves filled with folly
aisles fastened with dial tones
That could almost be Perseverence on Mars.
vapor wisping off
a chrome truck bumper
clown surviving death
"Blaze like a wyvern flying round the sun" —Browning
blonde testifies
that up is down
no screeds faze
blonde testifies
bodies hid confuse
in the furious din
blonde testifies
that up is down
Saturday, February 14, 2026
Another Streets of Minneapolis.
"After My Doctor Tells Me My Labs Are Normal
Studies have shown that you should not be feeling this way. Studies do not show a correlation between the symptoms and the disease. Studies encourage you to weep but only to yourself. Studies are always correct. Studies occupy the same position in time as an alarm clock. Studies have been conducted entirely in space that also say you should not be feeling this way. Studies indicate that pain is not weakness leaving the body but rather getting comfortable in it. Studies suggest that pain is all in the mind. Studies have not found a cure. Further studies have been canceled."
—Ly Faulk in Have Has Had
"Dust on the wind / Boots on the ground / Smoke in the sky / No peace found." —Ian Bogost quoting Velvet Sundown via
Japanese poster for Danger: Diabolik.
"The study concludes with a clear message: the sensationalist narrative linking lead to the fall of Rome is unsustainable." —Guillermo Carvajal in La Brujula Verde
“CXXIX
When did I ever deny, though this was fleeting,
That this was love? When did I ever, I say,
With iron thumb put out the eyes of day
In this cold world where charity lies bleating
Under a thorn, and none to give him greeting,
And all that lights endeavor on its way
Is the teased lamp of loving, the torn ray
Of the least kind, the most clandestine meeting?
As God’s my judge, I do cry holy, holy,
Upon the name of love however brief,
For want of whose ill-trimmed, aspiring wick
More days than one I have gone forward slowly
In utter dark, scuffling the drifted leaf,
Tapping the road before me with a stick.”
—Edna St Vincent Millay
Miskatonic University Classified Collection, Middle-East Expeditions, 1900-1936.
"不自殺聲明"
no death
by my own choice:
& if something happens
that looks like an accident, it
wasn't.
A declaration of no suicidal intent.
"We bought Article II of the United Nations Charter with the blood of a hundred million human beings, and less than a century later, it's being sold for nothing by people who don't even understand what they're doing." —@goldwagnathan.bsky.social
Reality Check: Ryan Coogler, Sinners, and Things That Go "Tsk...Tsk" in the Night.
I'm just talkin' 'bout 𝑠𝑛𝑜𝑤-𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑒𝑠. I'm just cussing 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟 𝑔𝑒𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑝𝑜.
No need for streetlamps when the Aurora is this bright.
Vallejo: "The Eternal Dice
My God, I'm crying over the life I live;
it grieves me to have taken your bread;
but this clay, poor and pensive,
isn't the crust fermented in your side:
you have no Marys who leave you!
My God, if you'd ever been human,
today you would know how to be God;
but you, who are always fine,
feel nothing of what your creation feels.
And man, yes, suffers for you: he's the one who is God!
Today candles burn in my witch eyes
as in a condemned man's eyes,
my God, you light all your candles,
and we'll play with the old die...
Perhaps, O gambler!, throwing for the luck
of the entire universe, the dark-circled eyes
of Death will turn up,
like funereal snake-eyes of mud.
My God, and on this night, deaf and dark,
you can't play anymore, because Earth
is a corroded die and, already worn down
from tumbling out luck,
is unable to stop except in a hollow,
the void of an immense grave."
(tr Rebecca Seiferle, 2003)
"FOR BEES
(Aelindrome in the Golden Ratio)
16180339
You hone yields
and inform us.
You perform in fields
and you honey."
—@anthonyetherin.bsky.social
In space no one can hear you in space.
"Of course, it’s not really possible to avoid affirming life, even when you’re writing a horror story defaming it. The act of writing is an affirmation, as is the act of suicide." —Thomas Ligotti via
"To like Chesterton despite his paradoxes is a little like liking Venice despite its canals..." (via @timesflow.bsky.social)
"Farewell to the humble charms of wabi, the morose pleasures of sabi. Greetings to the potent joy of cold-forged steel...to the harsh intoxications of temperature-resistant polymer components...and a special hello to pure ballistic stopping power." --Thomas Ligotti, My Work Is Not Yet Done (2002)
greenish clouded light
Violet Opal lyrics
explained by AI
the same story i suppose
fire behind embracing pair