Generating worlds, exploring them, losing the thread.
Best of all worlds. MOM, Genesis 2.0, and Resurrections are topping bestseller lists worldwide for the third month in a row. Mobs are rioting in the streets of major cities everywhere, demanding the author cough up Kill Cade, the fourth novel in the MAGIC CIRCLE series. Hollywood agents are climbing in the windows, groupies clamor at the door. Sara won’t talk to me. It’s amazing.
Yeah. And all this is happening in a near-adjacent parallel universe where the internet … Read more
Do we need a word for the irrational fear of Trump policy initiatives (otherwise described as 
‘tweets’)? Maybe not. Many will argue that such a fear is in no way irrational, and hence may not be properly described as a phobia.
Whatever. I hereby present three phobias I’ve mentioned before on this blogsite. All three, I’ll suggest, will serve while we search for a more Trump-specific expression.
“Trump?” Sara looks at me with concern. “Isn’t there anything else to talk … Read more
Items overheard on BBC radio this morning: Japan is forbidding entry to anyone with tattoos; and Argentina is suffering a plague of beavers, a non-native species that has has changed water drainage patterns sufficiently that native plant species are going locally extinct. All this comes hot on the heels of Trump winning the US presidential election, and I take it to be further evidence of space-time dimensional slips that have us careening from one progressively less adjacent parallel universe to … Read more
Today we introduce another useful expression.
Metathesiophobic catatonia (n.): paralysis induced by fear of the perception that any action, including any decision, will change the future. Those of the multiversal persuasion might decribe this as inertia brought on by terror that the slightest exercise of agency will result in the agent entering an adjacent parallel universe, forever barred from the one in which the action was performed, unable to return to a world where the decision was never taken.
And … Read more
Jack Shackaway here.
Friends have just suggested I join them on a sailing trip at the end of November. Joyous news, right? Not so. Now I have to weather the usual squall of anxieties and conflicting inclinations, maybe even a massive storm of dither.
“How soon do I have to tell you one way or the other?” I ask them.
“You’ve got a problem with free sailing trips?” they say.
The problem. Following an extended period of freelance-writerly doldrums … Read more
In the last two posts, we’ve seen how tobacco smokers and anthropogenic climate-change deniers demonstrate a similar psychology.
Jack Shackaway now looks at a third such group — those, including himself, who take motorcycle taxis in Bangkok. Jack offers this as a follow-up to both my “How I quit smoking” and my “Immortality for Joe Atheist” posts.
He claims the following sketch has been sitting on his computer since back in a time (or a … Read more
There’s been much news, of late, concerning the planarian worm, which is effectively immortal. Unfortunately, this version of life everlasting offers little hope to us humans.
But there’s a fix, one that doesn’t mean we have to begin reproducing asexually if we want to persist to the planarian extent. Of necessity, I’ll argue, we’re already, always and forever, living in our “afterlife.”
Having our sex and living forever too
Here’s my theory, for whatever it’s worth, and in … Read more
From the man who brought you The Producers, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein–his latest comic blockbuster:
Reality!
Reality keeps changing. Before passing on the latest hard evidence for that proposition, however, let me tell you how I first tumbled to this interesting fact.
Authorities progressively less authoritative. Remember when you were a kid? Back when you believed your parents knew everything, and could always be relied on to give you the straight goods? That was back in a time … Read more
The other day I went to meet the charming Ms. Weow at the new Dean & Deluca coffeeshop, a glitzy branch of the New York deli in what’s to be the ground floor of the Ritz Carleton Residences, still under construction.
On my way over, I phoned her to check that I had the correct location.
“Right at the Chong Nongsri BTS Station,” she said.
“West side or east?”
“Which way are you facing now?” she asked me.
“What do … Read more
Hey, and that’s just one island. The basis of the whole world is probably even weirder.
(There’s a PowerPoint selection of more surreal photos by Erik Johansson afloat in cyberspace, but I can’t seem to establish a link here. Ask me, and I’ll e-mail it to you.)… Read more