Shores of Night

  This note is brought to you from one of two camps. First, the camp of I'm an idiot and questions things everybody has already worked out, or second, I'm asking difficult questions we don’t want to talk about. Anyway, let’s start with a nice, simple, question… What is reality?  Seriously, what is it? Nobody seems to be sure and it’s become something I pick at and find myself coming back to all the time. I don’t really know why, but I think that a) my consciousness has changed a bit and b) I’m very conscious that things are always presented as solids when everything’s actually quite porous and granular, even when it's a notional concept.  Or perhaps notional concepts are especially because they often seem to be built to fit one particular story, ignoring alternative narratives. They’re intensely personal, because they’ve been shaped by our own experiences (and each of us lives within our own reality). The other thing is that we instinctively seek to make these things conc...

 I've been thinking about personals ads at for a while - partly because I'm single and seeking. Part of me started to think about how weird you could get with some fandoms and the way you could make things extremely esoteric and odd - almost to the point where you were talking at a level which most people didn't get. I'm posting 20 of the odd ad ideas I came up with - a couple of which are actually genuine.  Eater of Souls seeks Agent Candid for assignations in the stacks, adventures against the dwellers at the bottom of the Mandelbrot Set, trips to Dunwich, and <REDACTED>, <REDACTED>, <REDACTED>; and CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. (Laundry Files) Moth Kinden seeks flame to flutter around, cast magic with, and generally fail to understand technology with. (Shadows of the Apt) Bear Tribe member seeks similar to love and share a cave with. (Seasons of the Fall) Tiefling Bard seeks a fellow adventurer to raid dragon’s hoard with. (Dungeons and Dragons)  Tiefling B...

  I have long been interested in the question of what counts as “real” in our periods of existence on this planet. It seems to me that humans are awfully good at creating abstract notions that they then use to limit their behaviour and the way they relate to each other. Often to the point where they’re given more validity than things that actually exist in a concrete way. For example the *idea* that cats might be in league with the Devil arguably led to the Black Death because the fear of cats led to the deaths of so many which allowed the rats that carried the disease bearing fleas to flourish. In a similar fashion we have seen that certain people are more concerned with the state of the economy than people’s lives in the Covid pandemic. Quite apart from the fact that putting money ahead of life is repugnant, this rather overlooks that money isn’t actually real, but something that has worth because we believe it does as a species. If we stopped believing in money tomorrow, it woul...