All Thoughts Being Equal

I. Roz was already in the office. Of course; he'd barely sleep if there was still a case to solve. Bastard. I shuffled in and left the door to clatter shut behind me. He didn't look up before stating, simply: "You're a wreck." Bastard. I half-mumbled, half-rasped something at him. To my pounding ears it sounded vaguely like "fuckyouneedashower." "Water shut off today. Pipe rusted through or something. Apparently the basement's flooded." "fuckthatimgoingbed" "You have a client." I stopped. Blinked. The greasy fog in my field of vision swirled and resolved into my partner, Roz, and a woman. I glared blearily at Roz. He shrugged with the minutest of movement, but his face remained infuriatingly nonchalant, eyes casually running over some of his case files in one hand, a mug of coffee steaming in the other. He was sitting on the desk. On the desk. When we had a client. We had a client! My gaze lur...

Something I thought up the other day. Heading in a weird noirish direction with pulp-fantasy trappings. Any feedback is, of course, appreciated. --- This world was not made for us. Well, not specifically for us. I'm sure there was a line item or two in the Grand Design, earmarked for "humankind," some tiny fraction of the cosmic budget allotted on our behalf. Sure, we've done alright for ourselves in those intervening millennia. But every day―every fucking day―we're reminded that there are more philosophies in heaven than ever dreamed of us. Because the gods are real. Some of them are even ours. But most aren't. And all of them don't seem to give two divine shits about us. "Shit." Definitely one drink too many. No other explanation for my black anti-theistic mood. Well, last call was I-don't-know-how-many minutes ago anyway. Three fingers waggled to the bartender and I sent him back to the cashbox with exact change, as usual. ...

This was provoked by Scott Alexander's wonderful story "... And I Show You How Deep the Rabbit Hole Goes." I decided to take the original Tumblr meme and put a pessimistic, Needful Things-esque spin on it. Comments and critiques are welcome: I wrote this all at once in a mad haste of inspiration (thus my earlier word choice) so it may or may not be rough. "Let's just say you don't pay... with money. " — Mr. Needful *** YELLOW "Gives you the ability to read and search the minds of anyone you can see, even if it's a picture. You can also turn their minds 'off' to put them into a coma." Yes, now everyone's mind is an open book to you. But alas, the man never said whether you'd be able to understand these books. The first time you attempt to use this power, on a photograph of the President, it felt like that time you had to read Immanuel Kant in college, except that now "A Critique of Pure Reason" was co...

I've written some fiction stuff that might still be worth reading, but I don't consider it finished because not many people have read it at all. So I might as well keep up my post schedule and devote Fridays to publishing poems, excerpts, or serializations that I've written. Comments and critiques are welcome, or just ignore me on Fridays. The Black Sorcerer of Doom's Barrow, pt. 2 The door, for all its massive size and stony bulk, slid aside easily at Tyr's sinewy insistence. The sepulcher's antechamber yawned ahead of him, devouring all the light from outside. Heeding the sparrow's advice, Tyr wrapped a bundle of reeds and lit them with flint and steel, and carried the improvised torch into the gloom. The graven sarcophagi of long-dead men lined the walls in their square slots, dreaming of some forgotten era of bone-garnished warlords and green stone idols to strange gods. In some places the granite coffins lay smashed on the floor, the bones in a ...

I've written some fiction stuff that might still be worth reading, but I don't consider it finished because not many people have read it at all. So I might as well keep up my post schedule and devote Fridays to publishing poems, excerpts, or serializations that I've written. Comments and critiques are welcome, or just ignore me on Fridays. The Black Sorcerer of Doom's Barrow, pt. 1 The seer spoke: This is the tale of Tyr Haefest and the Black Sorcerer of Doom's Barrow. Know it, traveler, and know it well. Tyr was a man of broad chest and mighty thews, whose name was known from the chill wall of ice in the farthest North to the sun-kissed dreaming seas to the South. A demon-slayer was he, they said. A vanquisher of the agents of Chaos and the Outer Dark, they said. A true champion, they said. On his wide-ranging journeys he never declined to aid even the lowliest peasantry, if some evil threatened them. He wandered according to the will of the Light Immacu...