About
This is a blog. Triumphantly, it is no longer on Substack. It hosts a few types of content produced by the owner of the blog: reviews, essays, fiction, and TTRPG, uh, guff. Should said owner of said blog learn to produce other types of content, that the great pyre which brightens the digital night might know further delicacies of stranger and greater forms, such novel contents will be fed to said pyre. Pyre is an excellent word; please say it with me now, wherever you may be: “pyre.” Very good.
The prose/poetry content in this blog can be, at times, stilted, unusual, overly formal, overly informal, overly curt, long-winded, baroque, upsetting, and at times poor. No apology is given, as no promise was ever made. As this blog is not disseminated via feed (beyond the hallowed and eldritch RSS), I am confident in saying that if you are here, you asked for this.
Thoughts/opinions/works are my (the owner of this blog) own; who else's would they be? Generative AI, i.e. the chained demons which produce works of visual, auditory, and linguistic simulacrum, are viewed unfavourably by this blog's owner and their "labour" is not featured on this blog. Should this offend or upset you, I ask that you consider why you have given your allegiance to demons chained by other people; the real Ubermensch/McCoy would create their own art, or at the very least their own demons.
I do not believe myself to be a good writer nor a good artist, not least because doing so would make it incredibly hard to ever finish anything. Please, reader, allow yourself that same self-compassion.
Thematic, stylistic, and personal influences include, in no specific order I care to communicate to you: the work of Susanna Clarke, specifically Piranesi; the work of Walter Moers, specifically Rumo; the artistic ambitions and prose stylings of H.P. Lovecraft and a fundamental disavowal of his disposition, hatred, misanthropy and failure to rise to the challenge of being human; the general vibe of David Bentley Hart; pansychism, object-oriented ontology, and, regrettably, Schopenhauer; the podcast Weird Studies; the brightness and joy found in Becky Chambers' novels, which very likely saved my life at least once; the early writing of Jeff Vandermeer, in particular Ambergris; the work of Clark Ashton Smith, namely his sorcerers and lushness; the work of Jorge Luis Borges; what I’ve started to think of as the “Neo-Classicist Science Fiction club”—Ada Palmer (Terra Ignota) and Jo Walton (Thessaly); solarpunk, primarily as a political utopianism and secondarily as a movement; the performance work of Brennen Lee Mulligan and, broadly, his humanistic and social outlook as expressed in interviews; Disco Elysium, as a work of art, and Disco Elysium, as a story of artistic factionalism and capitalistic folly that, itself, contains a story of artistic factionalism and capitalistic folly; nesting and turtles all the way down, as concepts; the technicolour mythopoetics of Path of Achra and its kind developer Ulfsire; Dwarf Fortress, its community and its wonders; my time sent chopping cabbage and being set on fire; long paragraphs and their eventual ends; everyone I have ever loved and ever hated, and the fact that the number of persons falling into the former is higher than the latter; a thousand and one other things, which I have forgotten yet to name.
Updates infrequently. Do not give me money.