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  • Machine Sonnet No. 25

    China is intent to filter in nature.Circled nothing is had,Or must not cut out the logo. Tuscany and steak seasoning. The blood in place until use. Our kindness may be beyond the damage.Slightly tapered waist. Cream ice glass. Kansas is too harsh. They definitely could use an interpretation. Health news and politics.Clinical governance and visibility,Sitting…

  • The Essential Tales of Chekhov

    compiled and introduced by Robert Ford, 1998 Melancholy thoughts haunted me still. Painful as it was to me, yet I remember I tried as it were to make my thoughts still gloomier and more melancholy. You know people who are vain and not very clever have moments when the consciousness that they are miserable affords…

  • Frank Herbert

    Frank Herbert was the author of sci-fi hit Dune and other nonsense. Herbert was born in October 1920, year of the radio, to paupers in the bleak nowhere of Tacoma. Conditions of the Great Depression transferred his uprearing to some nearby relatives in Salem. His early years read like a lifetime. He typed up a…

  • Our Technetronic Era: The Onset of the Technetronic Age

    An Annotated Reading of Between Two Ages, by zbigniew brzezinski, 1970, pages 10-14 Previous Entries: Chapter One, and the Introduction to Brzezinski. The impact of science and technology on people and societies, especially in the more advanced countries of the world, was becoming the major source of contemporary change in Brzezinski’s time (1960s, for this book).  The post­industrial society…

  • The Curia

    Seed: “Urban II used the First Crusade to become a diplomatic leader of lay monarchs; they looked to him, not the emperor. He also built up the Church’s administrative machine; under him there emerged the curia, a Roman bureaucracy corresponding to the household administrations of the English and French kings.” Query: What benefit was this…

  • Place Sketch: Bronzeville

    Erected on the light side of a forest, near the border between the Lowlands and Midlands departments. The city of Bronzeville is the nation’s capital in ore mining and metallurgy. It is one of the only cities of the Lowlands department that has never had severe economic disparities. Markets in Bronzeville have always thrived. In…

  • Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey

    Isabel Fonseca, 1995 “The Gypsies — with their peculiar mixture of fatalism and the spirit, or wit, to seize the day — have made an art of forgetting. Historically the Gypsies have not had an idea of, or word for, themselves as a group. In place of a nation, they recognize different tribes and, more…

  • Our Technetronic Era: The Revolution and Global Impacts

    A Reading of between two ages: America’s role in the technetronic era, by ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI “Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. . . . There are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it…

  • Machine Learning Sonnet No. 24

    Nothing nefarious about that. Holy bright flash Batman. Cute Christmas cards. Your rhetoric is disturbing to talk back to. Major kink going around on campus. Come even if your valve is blocked. Balance, control, video. Cookbook of the successful operation, But it’s maintenance your fence be needing. Statue of Mother is frantic to find ourselves.…

  • The Death and Life of Great American Cities

    Jane Jacobs, 1961 I just finished this one this morning. I’ve never had any great interest in city planning. I picked this book up because I had a free book credit from Thrift Books and I needed some reference material for a writing project where a major character inherits a piece of a capital city.…

  • Millenarianism

    Millenarianism, also known as millenarism, is a belief in a coming fundamental transformation of society, in part through supernatural action, after which “all things will be changed”. In religious context, it often refers to the doctrine of or belief in a future thousand-year age of blessedness, beginning with or culminating in the Second Coming of…

  • Our Technotronic Era

    The Technetronic era :‘a society that is shaped culturally, psychologically, socially and economically by the impact of technology and electronics – particularly in the arena of computers and electronics.’

  • Rune City

    Like Rook Island, Rune City is another unique metropolis. While it was formerly the seat of House Dion, it has been run by a council table since the Good Revolution. Unlike Rook Island, the city’s governing is not autonomous. There are elections for council seats, but they occur every two years and the whole of…

  • Machine Learning Sonnet No. 23

    Various selection and you throw the child object. Perhaps split the kit for sale next time. Do you crave admittance to the law? Or a case report of the current day Carved into the concrete. Let one of them speak to my burial. The grammatical morpheme deficit, Of spectrum disorder and psychopathy, Is it manufactured…

  • Bernie Wrightson

    Contemporary illustrator best known for his contribution to creating the Swamp Thing and his illustrations for Frankenstein.

  • Legends II: Dragon, Sword, and King

     A collection of short fantasy stories from Terry Brooks, George R.R. Martin, Diana Gabaldon, Orson Scott Card, and Elizabeth Haydon. I skipped the Martin one since I had just read A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and Martin’s entry was one of the Dunk and Egg stories.  The Yazoo Queen by Orson Scott Card  I’ve…