Yesterday was Memorial Day. I went out to get some food and everything was closed, so I had to go to McDick's. After eating I was troubled by questions of consciousness as I sat on a bench in the sun near my building. I was watching flies darting back and forth to various pieces of trash, and pigeons, and a very tiny and amazingly fast bug of ( Read more... )

From an ongoing discussion on Utopia Dammit! BBSOur self-made and innate issues that are reducing our already slim chances of long-term survival are the same as those that make successful manned interstellar travel unlikely. First among those is that most of us, and we as a collective, are simply incapable of taking a long enough view of things, ( Read more... )

Okay, I just got mildly tweaked out in the shower about where the fuck did the universe come from, and all that. I felt pretty small for a minute.

How can I be sure this is reality?

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An 8½x11 sheet of text and a few poster boards full of photographs are such a vast compression of a human being that the resulting image is, in some ways, nearly unintelligible to one who did not know her. It's obvious that Margaret Bradley was much more than runner, violinist, and student. The long, long line of people at her visitation attested ( Read more... )

( Believing in fate is deeply comforting on a very primitive level. )