One Boy and his Dog (Part Two)
Mark wakes to find himself blind and deaf. He panics for a moment and then realises that his eyes and ears are gluey with drying slug-slime. His mouth is sealed too and he can only breathe through his left nostril. He tries to wipe his face but finds that his arm is stuck to the floor. He panics all over again and thrashes against the muck, panting through his nostril. At last his arm tears free and he digs his fingers into the mask of slime over his face and claws it away. He sucks in a huge breath of air and finds himself taking unexpected pleasure in the simple act of breathing. Read more…
One Boy and His Dog (Part One)
When he thinks about his life, Mark pictures his job as a giant grey toad. A toad with mottled, warty skin that squats in the middle of his life, crushing all the joy and creativity from it and leaving him feeling flat and slimy.
Although Mark is rather proud of that metaphor he prefers to avoid thinking about his life at all. Not only is such contemplation a rich source of depression, but second-guessing the series of decisions that led to his current circumstances drives him half-crazy. Read more…
Kristallnacht
This is a piece I wrote for the SCP Foundation (http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com) but which was unpopular due to its reference to a real world event. At the time of writing it’s still up on the site as SCP-557 but I think it will soon be deleted. I actually rather like it and I’m therefore posting it here for posterity.
Sculpture/Thread
I found this old poem I wrote when I was going through some papers of mine the other day. I have no idea where the subject matter came from, to be honest, but I liked it enough to save it from the obscurity of a printout on paper and put it here on my blog. Read more…
The Problem Of Uncertainty
I enjoy reading Internet debates; in particular I enjoy reading what happens when rationality and irrationality collide. The Web serves as no-man’s land in the battles between the forces of religion and atheism; science and pseudoscience; superstition and logic.
As I read and participate in more of these debates I am coming to realise that there exists a fundamental problem affecting the marshalling of evidence for deployment against the enemy. Partly a consequence of the glut of information available online, I refer to it as the Problem of Uncertainty.
Richard Dawkins on Being Alive
“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.”
Accommodationism
I’m one of those people who prefers to avoid giving offence, who despises confrontation and who has a deep-seated psychological need to be liked by as many people as possible. One might think that a personality of this type might lend itself well to a spirit of accommodationism with those who hold views contrary to my own on a variety of subjects.
Mortality
Before I was conceived there was a period of time, stretching back to the beginning of time itself, during which I did not exist.
An Open Letter to American Christians Who Speak Out Against Homosexuality Because of Their Religion
Dear Christian,
I know it’s difficult when the view you hold and believe is right becomes threatened by the prevailing social norms of the society in which you live. What you’re going through now is quite similar to the trauma suffered by the people who believed ‘blacks’ were less human and worthy of rights and respects than ‘whites’.
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