Sometimes the Wrong Door is the Only One for You

I am not a time traveler – more like a time repeater. I’ve witnessed the birth of my first child four times now, on random days with several normal weeks between them.

The fourth time, May 12, now that’s a day I don’t want to live through anymore. But –

Buddha Bot
by Sumrow

music for people stuck in transtemporal space, 1:

Jean Ritchie, "Hangman"

music for people stuck in transtemporal space, 2:

Radar Men from the Moon, "Intergalactic Dada & Space Trombones"

music for people stuck in transtemporal space, 3:

Juno Reactor, "God is God"

Have you experienced deja vu today?

The Worm that Came to Stay

Deep where the fish don't breathe, Dorian had a silent listener.

The boy would go down to the lake with Doorknob, his Chihuahua. He'd stand by the water, hit reeds with a stick and tell them to speed up production. Like dad, Dorian had employees.

The lake drank Dorian's vocables.

Echo
by Ken Wong

Says Wikipedia:
"The hypolimnion is the dense, bottom layer of water in a thermally-stratified lake. It is the layer that lies below the thermocline. (...) Being at depth, it is isolated from surface wind-mixing during summer, and usually receives insufficient irradiance (light) for photosynthesis to occur."

The thermocline is a shifting layer that separates the surface from the still, life- and oxygen-deprived water below.

Companion words:
Epilimnion, the top of a lake
Metalimnion, the middle layer (changes depth as the day rolls on)

music for silent listeners

A Day that Never Ends is a Night Without Beginning

That's it, I'm going to quit my job and lie down on the M-Line and wait. Dismemberment by streetcar. Sweet!

I don't want to live on an occupied planet. Wanna know what those things are, with the wings you can see through and the singing? Not whales, I tell you.

Cicada
by Teagan White

Sometimes the idea for a prompt emerges from free writing. This time around, I'll give you my admittedly bizarre motivator:

As time dwindles and my face melts, the no-dragons made of nothingness and air lighten the Boston skyline, giving dusk the odd appearance of a sunless everday. There shall be no moon tonight, but Mars, magnified through the Dyson-Katzenberg, could loom large, given the proper conditions. If so, Mars will bathe the streets with its orange glow, and the streetcars swim through it like fiberglass eels on rails.

music for a sunless everday

The Face that Ruins Everything

I start every morning with my eyes closed. Since March, that is. The bruises on my knees have bruises of their own and my little toe could be broken. I don't know.

I can't go out with this thing growing on my cheek. How would people react?

Good Day Sir
by Sweden10

So, what inspired my title today? Click here and I'll take you to The Face that Ruins Everything.

Some people are afraid of their own reflection. Others loathe their bodies. A few poor souls dread the thought of being touched. I imagined a protagonist burdened with all those troubles, plus incipient schizophrenia on top of that. Note: contrarily to public perception, schizophrenia is nothing like dissociative identity disorder (formerly known as "multiple personality disorder"). A schizophrenic will experience bizarre delusions, such as everybody else being made out of paper, or the government sending emails directly to their brains. Schizophrenics do not develop "alters" -- alter egos -- the way DID sufferers do.

Have some Plaid now. Empty your mind of horrible thoughts. Hug a kitten and make it listen to Rachmaninoff for ten hours or so. You'll feel much better. The kitten, possibly not. But you won't know until you try.

It Is a Moral Teething

Nobody on the station knows where the lizard came from or why it attached itself to my ear. Whenever we try to tell home base about it, they pretend not to listen and always change the subject.

And yet it's here. Marjorie likes it even less than I do.

Fun with Lizards

Tinkerhell, the Black Metal Florist

Tina was a girl who fell. She tripped on wayward bricks, small dogs, homeless people sleeping on the sidewalk.

On the way to work she stubbed her toe on a vending machine and staggered into a florist's. Surrounded by funeral-red carnations, a longhaired man stopped reading his Black Pullet.

The Crane Wife
by Budi Satria Kwan

The Black Pullet is one of many grimoires that'll teach you how to make charms and talismans and contains words of power that summon djinni. I doubt whether any of the spirits mentioned in the Black Pullet are still available, but you can read it for entertainment value.

As for my black metal florist, I must attribute direct inspiration to Vegan Black Metal Chef. I selected a video for you to watch right here on the blog if you can't be arsed* to check out the man's YouTube channel.

(*"Can't be arsed" -- one of my favorite Britishisms. Because it's rude.)

Desert Islands Are Shitty Places for Music Lovers

Today I bring you 3 variations on the desert island/shipwreck/castaway theme. I tried my best to avoid clichés.

1

"You want to eat me? Are you serious?"
Postal didn't take his eyes off the fire.
"Sure," he said, "if you die first."
"What makes you think we're going to die on this island?" I asked.
The moon peeked from behind a cloud.
"Forget I said anything," Postal replied.

2

I'm going to beat you, you damn island. By dying. Then I'm appearing to Ekaterina as a ghost so she knows where to find my body.

Singing and banging on coconuts passes the time. It also keeps the flying lizards at bay, so I can starve in peace.

3

Stricher found a rusted knife stuck in a tree and a cracked skull beside a rock down by the gully. The gully led down to a dark crevice he didn't particularly want to explore, but something caught the light in a way that spoke of metal or glass, not water.

Well Seasoned
by Anna-Maria Jung

The BBC started Desert Island Discs, a biographical and factual radio show, in 1942. It's still going strong and you can listen to its massive archive online. Fortunately it's accessible outside the UK. 

I just hate it when my physical location prevents me from accessing free content intended for public consumption -- there should be no borders on the Internet. Otherwise, what's it good for? Imagine Facebook, G+ or Twitter partitioned into all these tiny, nay granular, local divisions. Now imagine yourself only being able to interact with people within a 100-mile radius. Does that sound sane to you? 

Elsewhere on the webbysphere, Worlds Without End -- a fine resource for readers and writers -- presents an easy-to-read, useful overview of current science-fiction and fantasy magazines. 

Click here to visit Worlds Without End

Want even more? OK, I have a Twitter list of literary magazines and journals from all over the world, featuring 389 titles.

In Memory of Fallen Stars

Unu appeared to the girl as a crane. She was 7, washing her clothes. Unu asked her, "Do you know numbers, little girl?"
"What are you, to speak like a man?" the girl asked.
"I'm a man in spirit," said Unu, "and my spirit speaks so you can hear."

The Beach Comber
by Tarrby

Maybe one day in the distant future, along our path to post-humanity, we'll develop "superpowers" like reliable ESP or time travel by discovering and fully understanding certain mathematical structures. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, it all stems from this fascinating interview with cosmologist Max Tegmark on the deepest substratum of the universe. I recommended it yesterday and do so again because you don't want to miss it.

Just imagine. Equations that gave you the power to duplicate yourself in a different time and place. To occupy the consciousness of every single individual on the planet. You'd be the most dangerous person in the universe -- unless laws existed to keep you in check...

Japanese Crane
by Sandra Dieckmann

Further reading:
Cyborg America: inside the strange new world of basement body hackers
Humans with amplified intelligence could be more powerful than AI
How I rediscovered the oldest zero in History

Inspirational stuff:
35 ways to be a more creative blogger.

music for cyborgs