Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

We’re all so used to working in a purely abstract realm that it seems almost bizarre to go out into the real world and physically do something.


Root just felt like talking about words. The SAS blokes refer to this kind of activity as wanking.


Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker’s game because they almost always turn out to be – or to be indistinguishable from – self-righteous sixteen-years-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.


But this is a degenerate case, where “degenerate”, to a mathematician, means “annoyingly boring”.

 

Milk and Blood

Warnings: body fluids, body horror, main character death.

Actors: myself, Friend, [Friend’s] Mother, Old Man.

Image by CuriousCanvas


I’m at Friend’s. She and Mother are getting ready to go to the inauguration of our new President. They are dressing up like barbies. Mother has a diadem and looks like Queen Elisabeth. Friend looks amazing in the first dress she picks: a long white gown with many thin layers that makes her look like a fairy.

Continue reading Milk and Blood

The Old Ceremony

By strangers’ coasts and waters, many days at sea,
I come here for the rites of your unworlding,
Bringing for you, the dead, these last gifts of the living
And my words—vain sounds for the man of dust.
Alas, my brother,
You have been taken from me. You have been taken from me,
By cold chance turned a shadow, and my pain.
Here are the foods of the old ceremony, appointed
Long ago for the starvelings under the earth:
Take them: your brother’s tears have made them wet: and take
Into eternity my hail and my farewell.

Catullus
Image: karatastamer @ DeviantArt