Story: The Shamans of External Changes.

Shinjuku Filth & Darrin Verhagen - [Loup Alloy]--- Much time had passed, since their last encounter with the outsiders, the soft ones, the slow ones who came from beyond and did not understand the ways of The People, many thousands of years, by the reckonning of the outsiders, and many more by their own, in relation to their fast, brutal lives. But the outsiders had taught them much, had shown them new things, and gave a meaning to that brutality. After all, had not the outsiders brought the People their god?

Vangelis - [Memories of Green]--- All those thousands of years ago, She was shown to the People, She was brought to them, and to the seat of their power, and She brought them low. The Rift Which Lies Between had shown them destruction and ruin, had murdered whole families, clans, and cities, over and over again. But had She not done this to make them better? Had She not made them whole? When they tried to destroy Her, She responded, in kind. When they tried to assimlate Her to their ways, She inverted their efforts, ultimately changing them, breaking them of their stagnant, old ways. (A Perfect Circle - [3 Libras (Massive Attack Remix)]). Of all of the clans, only the shamans could see this, only they could fully understand the gift which had been given to them.

A thousand years after their final physical encounter with the Rift Which Lies, the People began to change and to understand. No longer content with being blindly tied to the monarchy, they began to assert independce, to direct their own lives. They would pair as they wished, breed as they wished, hunt, build, and above all, worship as they wished. No longer were the old gods applicable to their lives, no longer would they live in fear and hungry anticipation of some faceless Creator/Hunter. (cEvin Key - [Sklang]). Their ancestors had seen the Rift, the very Rip in all that they knew, the yawning chasm of destruction and creation, and She was far greater than any mere god of the Hunt. She was far more terrible. They knew this, now, and they would worship her, and they would thank her.

Einstürzende Neubauten - [12305 (Te Nacht)]--- They began to breed themselves into themselves, refining a pure vessel, a sacrificial line with whose blood they might mark themselves in the sacred symbols and find communion with the Rip. Those who would be the ancestors to the shamans designed angular, curving markings, immitating the written leavings of that awful abyss, and they used the blood of their more holy and honoured to tattoo and scar the marks upon themselves. (Einstürzende Neubauten - [Wüste]). This communion complete and indellible, they would scream and howl in the wilderness, and in the silence, they would wait.

They would wait, under the stars, for days and nights, hissing and screeching to the Great Rift, listening to the answering nothing, knowing that they must adapt and evolve to survive, but that the People had seen no true change, for millenia. Though they had known different forms, had seen other skies, they had never known anything other than the blood, the kill, the hunt, and the worship of the queen.

Michael Andrews - [Did You Know Him?]--- Thousands of years later, the shamans sit, across many worlds, their darkest black carapices reflecting the infinte stars. (Nyarlathotep: The Crawling Chaos - [The Garden of Proserpine]). In the cold light they etch themselves in the ever-changing constant swirls of the Rip that Lies, and they begin to change. They know, now, that they are each a drone, each a hybrid, each a queen, and a soldier, and an egg, and an endomorph. The recognition of this constant internal metamorphosis has allowed the shamans something their anscesotrs never had, but may one day know: They are changing. They are becoming, always, aware of what they are. And they still reach out, across the stars.

--------------~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~--------------------

She awoke in a dark space, deep inside a crushing blackness that was more than blackness. She had heard her name, or what she thought had been her name, and had seen a light, ahead, as of a single bright star. (Space - [Female of the Species]). As she stretch and rolled, she realised what the emptiness and blackness wer; she stretched, rolled and moved, briefly toward the light. (A Star Called Wormwood - [Synthetic]). She did not care if she reached it, nor what it was, but after so long asleep, movement itself felt good. She felt old muscles against new, and relished the sensation, the potential of it. (Michael Andrews - [Time Travel]). Soon she would be fully awake, and her fingers or claws, teeth and tongues would again know the joy of hot liquid life pouring over them, and the fire from her hands.

--------------------------------------

Came up with that idea, last night, when Aliens was on, as we were heading to sleep.

DeathBoy - [Nanowire]--- I hope you enjoyed it, as I'm not sure it did everything i wanted it to, but I'll have to take a look at it, when I'm not ridiculously tired.

Good night. Dream Well.

Machine Gun

I saw the savior,
and the savior come my way
I thought I'd see it
In the cold light of day

but now i realize, that I'm only for me

if only i could see,
return myself to me,
and recognize the poison in my heart
there is no other place,
no one else i face
the remedy will break with how i feel

Here am I reflecting
what more can I say
for I am guilty
for the voice that I have made

too scared to sacrifice a choice, chosen for me

if only I could see
return myself to me
and recognize the poison in my heart
there is no other place
no one else I face
the remedy to agree with how i feel
©2008 Portishead. All Rights.

You should buy this album.

You should read the news, today.

You should meet someone new, and enjoy their company.

You should give me a million dollars.

I think I just found my doctoral program.

Generously noted by moonandserpent:

'Curriculum Designed to Unite Art and Science'

'It’s been some 50 years since the physicist-turned-novelist C.P. Snow delivered his famous “Two Cultures” lecture at the University of Cambridge, in which he decried the “gulf of mutual incomprehension,” the “hostility and dislike” that divided the world’s “natural scientists,” its chemists, engineers, physicists and biologists, from its “literary intellectuals,” a group that, by Snow’s reckoning, included pretty much everyone who wasn’t a scientist. His critique set off a frenzy of hand-wringing that continues to this day, particularly in the United States, as educators, policymakers and other observers bemoan the Balkanization of knowledge, the scientific illiteracy of the general public and the chronic academic turf wars that are all too easily lampooned.

'Yet a few scholars of thick dermis and pep-rally vigor believe that the cultural chasm can be bridged and the sciences and the humanities united into a powerful new discipline that would apply the strengths of both mindsets, the quantitative and qualitative, to a wide array of problems. Among the most ambitious of these exercises in fusion thinking is a program under development at Binghamton University in New York called the New Humanities Initiative.

'Jointly conceived by David Sloan Wilson, a professor of biology, and Leslie Heywood, a professor of English, the program is intended to build on some of the themes explored in Dr. Wilson’s evolutionary studies program, which has proved enormously popular with science and nonscience majors alike, and which he describes in the recently published “Evolution for Everybody.” In Dr. Wilson’s view, evolutionary biology is a discipline that, to be done right, demands a crossover approach, the capacity to think in narrative and abstract terms simultaneously, so why not use it as a template for emulsifying the two cultures generally?'

I mean... holy SHIT.
I am more than intrigued.

Reposting something Political.

I haven't talked about this, yet. I just found out about it, this weekend, actually. But I will re-phrase Keith Olbermann's basic point: You would either have to be stupid, naive, desperate, or just plain scummy to [pretend to] not think that a remark about the possibility of your in-party opponent getting killed would be seen as a veiled threat. At the very least, it is distasteful, and inartful.

Stol this video from spinallandscape:

As I said, there: 'Well. Someone's getting fired.

'As a side note, is it normal to want to throw up, every time you encounter something grossly political, or should I maybe see a doctor?

'Because, I mean, I can play politik, pretty well, but there just this feeling like a little bit of my soul dying, and like I might vomit, pass out, and crack my head open on the end of something sharp, before rising from the dead as some kind of revengeful Anti-Christ, beset upon the political populace, crushing all willfully ignorant and deliberately inelegant speakers, in my path.

'Also, I would have Eye-Lasers.'

New people:

Also, let's all say hello to prosewitch and rata_min_shin.

Hello.