Necropolis Railway

Saturday, September 3, 2016

Vignettes by Me, on Themes Picked Randomly: Day Three

Theme 199: The Vessel

Captain Cage-de Ratte strode the length of his quarters on the U.S.S. Eagleclaw, a mighty Baltimore-class cruiser, alternately casting his eyes on the chop of the stormy night sea rolling past his porthole and then on the model sailing ship he had just completed atop his tidy desk. The roar of the four mammoth steam turbines reached his ears merely as a low hum. Updecks on the bridge, beeping and pinging instruments kept his crew alerted to all threats for miles in every direction. The instruments both plotted the ship’s course and laid it in with scarcely any human interference. Captain Cage-de Ratte huffed and muttered, gesturing to the model frigate, “In your day, men tasted the salt air, gazed at the horizon from atop the masts, to know what to do. Now we just do the bidding of blips and beeps!”

Aboard the H.M.S. Nonesuch, a weather-besieged three-masted frigate, Captain Heartstrings crashed down into his cramped chair in his cramped cabin, lit by sputtering lamp-flame, for the first time in three days. His livery was soaked through, his cowhide boots sloshed, and his teeth chattered. He had gone hoarse screaming over the bitter winds. Not half an hour prior, he had seen vindictive sprays tear two of his crewmen from middecks and toss them out to the churning void, never to return. The Captain’s belly groaned, unsatisfied with the meager allotment of stale grain he and his crew had been consigned to since the meat preserves had become infested. His eyes turned to the illustration on the cover of a French novel that lay on his desk: it was of a mechanical ship many times the size of the largest galleon, made all of silver, that was charging unperturbed through a roiling night storm. “Aye, that’d be the way to be!” Captain Heartstrings muttered between coughs.

Explanatory Postscript: When I say “picked randomly,” I mean picked from a Master List that I’ve compiled of 999 themes intended to serve as creative writing prompts (from the following sources: 501 Writing Prompts; 25 Creative Writing Prompts; Examples of Themes; List of Themes; 365 Creative Writing Prompts; 100 Themes Challenge Writing Prompts; List of Journal Ideas; and Top 10 Types of Story Themes). To pick a theme at random, I roll three ten-sided dice (the first for the hundreds place digit, the second for the tens, and the third for the singles) and find the theme under the number I have rolled. If I hit a theme I have already written on, I roll again. If I ever roll 000, I make up a theme. The Master List is a secret, so don’t ask for it.

Friday, September 2, 2016

Vignettes by Me, on Themes Picked Randomly: Day Two

Theme 307: Feelings about Unrequited Love

Between clawed and wedged apart slats, cracks in the ceiling plaster offer light and space just enough so that Desirée, her etiolated cheek sweating against the pinewood, can view Clive from the attic—as he dries dishes, as he strings the rigging on his model clipper, as he combs his hair, as he twists in his bedding. “Oh Clive,” Desirée whispers, her thick, greasy strands trembling with the expulsion of mephitic breath. “Clive. Now do you have time for me, darling?” As she gazes down at him from the darkness, her tongue slathers a cool board as if it were the back of his neck.

Clive sometimes becomes possessed of the conviction he hears someone whispering his name. And his anxious speculations over the creaking in the rafters have begun to creep into his dreams, though a thorough investigation has assured him no animal could enter the attic from either the sealed hatches or the painted-over venting.

Never once, however, has Clive wondered what became of that terminally shy woman from claims.

Explanatory Postscript: When I say “picked randomly,” I mean picked from a Master List that I’ve compiled of 999 themes intended to serve as creative writing prompts (from the following sources: 501 Writing Prompts; 25 Creative Writing Prompts; Examples of Themes; List of Themes; 365 Creative Writing Prompts; 100 Themes Challenge Writing Prompts; List of Journal Ideas; and Top 10 Types of Story Themes). To pick a theme at random, I roll three ten-sided dice (the first for the hundreds place digit, the second for the tens, and the third for the singles) and find the theme under the number I have rolled. If I hit a theme I have already written on, I roll again. If I ever roll 000, I make up a theme. The Master List is a secret, so don’t ask for it.

Thursday, September 1, 2016

Vignettes by Me, on Themes Picked Randomly: Day One

Theme 21: Weather outside the Window

Lazy lariats of slime slide down the elliptical outer portals after sputtering against the domed eaves, blotting out the dayshine.

“It’s clear to me,” Hilbert says, pointing to an unseen expanse beyond the clogged portals. “The weather regulators are tapping into the recycling vats again. They thought they could siphon off resources and give us a rainbow show. Instead, look what happens: the system overcorrects, and we get this again!”

Water beads inside the portals from the humidity caused by the overheated slime as it streaks away on the other side.

“Doesn’t bother me,” Hilda says, shrugging vaguely in her husband’s direction. She shifts position on the sofa pillows and reaches to open a transparent cubical enclosure. Now she can return to her latest passion, one she has neglected for her colonial duties: imprinting an uplifted micro-oraristrix with linguistic engrams.

Explanatory Postscript: When I say “picked randomly,” I mean picked from a Master List that I’ve compiled of 999 themes intended to serve as creative writing prompts (from the following sources: 501 Writing Prompts; 25 Creative Writing Prompts; Examples of Themes; List of Themes; 365 Creative Writing Prompts; 100 Themes Challenge Writing Prompts; List of Journal Ideas; and Top 10 Types of Story Themes). To pick a theme at random, I roll three ten-sided dice (the first for the hundreds place digit, the second for the tens, and the third for the singles) and find the theme under the number I have rolled. If I hit a theme I have already written on, I roll again. If I ever roll 000, I make up a theme. The Master List is a secret, so don’t ask for it.

Tuesday, August 30, 2016

Bits and Passages

A SPROOKJE

Under a bridge, a lubricious wodge of tatterdemalions sheltered from the rain.

THAT I AM REALLY LYING

I should say, when I say I believe this or that, that I am really lying, in a sense, since I am a complete speech-act pragmatist, and so I am only looking for the operational value in holding various beliefs as precepts to various potentially interesting philosophical practices. Though I do believe stable truth values hold within paradigms.

I would not go so far as to say that philosophy is a kind of literature, since it has definite governing aims and ways of positioning and contrasting arguments, independent from particular linguistic instantiations, and even has ways of proving things locally, under provisionally given precepts, but I would say that it is more like literature than science.

RESISTANCE TO HEGEL

Don't you understand that your resistance to Hegel contains the seeds of your acquiescence to Hegel? By denying Hegel you are only sublating Hegelian discourse and allowing it to flourish within the edifice of your denial, which propounds the positivity of its own negativity.

SAVE THE MOSQUITOES

In 2nd grade, apparently already an incorrigible satirist, I conducted a "Save the Mosquitoes" campaign; I made signs and passed out individually crayon-scrawled awareness-raising fliers. This was in Orlando, Florida. My teacher was more bewildered than annoyed, but she made me stop anyhow. I think it was my way of asking, "Is environmentalism hopelessly anthropocentric?"

BUT

Seriously though:
Fish people.

Proving Conspiracy Theories

The realization that humans and their institutions are in fact small and vulnerable overwhelms some people’s sense of truth. People resist the idea that one man who was a pretty good shot could kill the most powerful figure in the world, by himself, or that a small group of guys with box cutters could orchestrate a disaster that would plunge us into decades of war.

However, if you want to show that a sensational theory that contradicts loads of accepted evidence is true, you need very strong counter evidence—not some circumstantial bits and pieces cobbled together with your speculations about what seems likely to you.

You have to prove that an incredible thing is true, not prove that it hasn’t been disproven—or ask me to disprove it.

If you want me to believe that there is a species of giant hominid secretly lurking in North American forests, I don’t want to see your blurry pictures of something that may or may not be a guy in an ape suit, and I don’t want to hear your speculations as to why this idea “just makes sense.” I want the actual body of a Sasquatch, dead or alive. It’s on you to prove it with strong, undeniable evidence. It’s not on me to disprove your silliness.

This is important because when you become willing to play around with the truth and suppose the world really must be the way you feel it to be, you begin to think that your enemies may really be inhuman monsters, which opens the door for the worst forms of bigotry.

Sunday, July 31, 2016

Logo Design for Li

Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Stop Saying "That's So Random!"

Ok, this is very important! Stop saying "That's so random," or "random" in any configuration, when what you want to say is that something is peculiar, weird, unexpected, or chaotic. Randomness is a property of numbers or members of a set selected by a randomizing process. By definition, there is nothing unexpected or unpredictable about a thing that can be described as "random."

Think of it this way: you have a normal six sided die, and you roll it. Any result from one to six pips would be equally random (physics approximately permitting, of course). However, it would be truly strange to get seven pips. That would not be random. But when people say, "So random!" they seem to mean something truly strange has happened, not something to be expected from among the supposed available outcomes.