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The highway in October

crimson, scarlet, rust

coronal flares of autumn

living fire falls

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The Ruins of Middle-earth

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Even though “creepy” (to me, at least) means something less theatrical than slimy, clawed hands reaching out from under the bed to drag me away, it isn’t quite real enough to scare me. Realistic fiction often does the trick, but nothing scares me more than books with end-of-the-world scenarios. To me, apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic narratives tend to boast an amplified sort of reality. The fear and the despair are much too palpable, and the line between humanity and inhumanity seems much too blurry, and the characters are faced with such impossible decisions that the notion of goodness fades with the drive to survival. These are the stories that haunt me, the stories that reveal the true failures of humanity. And while I hesitate to pick these kinds of books up, I am usually happy I did read them.

from The Horror of Humanities: On The Stories That Scare Me (via bookriot)

The Road is one of those stories, still haunts me

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The Internet meme

A picture with some sort of humorous text that strikes most people as funny and gets passed on. Pinterest is full of them. I know people who waste precious minutes of their life just looking at these. Why? It’s like a private comedy club that makes you smile and you can share it with everyone you friend.

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Do you see what I see? I swear this is a Rorschach test

Joris Hoefnagel, Insects, 1597. Watercolor on vellum, Netherlands. Muzeul National Brukenthal

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Game of Thrones

One of the reasons this series was so initially popular is that everyone was a red shirt. When the author killed off Ned Stark in the first book people gasped. Literally. And then he wasn’t resurrected somehow either. A series with no guarantees. You never know who will be gruesomely killed next--and so we keep reading. 

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Redshirts

. Based on the STar Trek original series, many “away” missions to planets involved general crew (usually men) who would die in some dramatic fashion to illustrate how dangerous the situation was. They did not always have a name either. Meaning any disposable character in a plot doomed to a violent death. 

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Redshirts

You know who they are!

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Purple prose

“It was a dark and stormy night” is a meme for purple prose, an overly dramatic and ridiculously wordy way of stating something in Victorian style. It conveys banality and lack of imagination as a meme today.

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Snoopy

Opened all his books, while sitting on his doghouse, “It was a dark and stormy night” Often to get writers block after that line.

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It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.” — Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)

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Loved the rant about eyebrows too

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a dark and stormy night

the preface to a scary story?

elemental fears that reek of immanent danger?

how many books begin with this line I wonder. . .

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Meme of the day : 9/11

A tragic historical event that changed America’s view of itself in the world; catalyzed “the war on terror,” and became a catchphrase for describing the beginning of  “the end of the world as we know it.”

Where were you?

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Meme

Interested in memes right now, those nuggets of culture that we pass around like viruses.

The word meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, as an attempt to explain the way cultural information spreads;