New Tricks: on extinction and not finishing things

Rats on a sinking ship made of rats crewed by rats.

Week in Review: 22-29 December 2021

It’s a little funny to be starting this “week in review” series up again at the end of the year like this. But, start as you mean to continue, right? Also, the depressive haze of “nowhere to go, no one to see, nothing to do” of quarantine and the slow apocalypse has decided to lift … Continue reading Week in Review: 22-29 December 2021 →

Dreaming of all the endings

I used to wake up in a blind panic in the middle of the night, nerves alight with the horror not of dying but of watching the rest of the world die, and be swept away by forces too strong and too organic, too natural, to ever withstand. When I was 13, they showed the … Continue reading Dreaming of all the endings →

Zelda, Calamity, and Living Beyond The End

Once you get beyond the area given over to a state of nature, overshadowed, as it is, by the swirling malignancy of Calamity Ganon where he-it teems around Hyrule Castle, you quickly realize that you are far from alone. Beyond that immediate desolation and its ghosts, the rest of the world is populated with entrepreneurial spirits, adventurers, travelers, inventors, villagers, and fanatics.

Rationality and Superstition, some thoughts on reckoning in Weird Fiction

But Lovecraft often seems to walk on the knife's edge separating an annihilating Truth (accessible through rational scientific inquiry) and the safety of a recognizable supernatural reality (manageable through superstition and mystical belief).