all's swell that bends fell

Tartuthekely, half an arborescence trifurcatory athwail Krylb and trunsey of Gorragare: the breeding ground for Psenheetches and home to small gangs of outcast Yitteraries, each of them bearing the brunt of a parasitic philosopher occupying major portions of their secondary brains: the parasitic philosopher is a concept that evolved from the primitive meme mines of the Yitteraries Third Network Age, like the lolspoons, the silly Pin the Monkey game that nearly wiped out two generations of intellectual accomplishment amongst the Yitterary, bastackling your noon*.  The parasitic philosopher could be removed, but only by spending a couple of durations in Tartuthekely, where the ethereal zephyrs could wash such infectious mimetic agents from one's mind through sufficent exposure. Most of these Yitterary were outcasts because the Third Network age had ended and they could get appropriate exposure to conceptual prophylactics, so they arboresced from the Yitterfield to Tartuthekely where they could bask in the iatrous flow of the ethereal zephyrs.

But most of the groups weren't having luck: since the Third Network was down, they could not go to the Hypercyclopedia and check that the major subspecies of ethereal zephyr was in the portion of its migratory cycle where it had arboresced to Clonthoyl, and wouldn't be back for another three durations, too long for them to stay there without becoming field people or gettergaws, both of which risks they knew about but no one, even in their wrong mind, would take. So after a couple of weeks, they dejectedly ended up arborescing to one of the Interstitial Depot Plazas lining the inner membrane of this nightmare and spent a lot of time dozing and reading the popular Captain Hypoplasia comic that the Inubrium corporation has been seeding at various rest-stops and waystations. Fortunately, (and this, I think is somewhat still a secret), the Captain Hypoplasia comic is a memetic agent specifically designed to eradicate the parasitic philosopher.




* (a hard to explain social phenomenon that involved geotagging one's spleen and having a live feed of the metabolic status of one's spleen microblogged to a gaming site where one was rewarded points based on certain metabolic configurations, and then eating some franch fruit to lower one's serum colchuamine below detectable levels: players would find ways of sneaking in franch fruit into someone else's meal, and this practice was called "bastackling your noon", and was popular for about thirty thousand hours on the main trunk of the Yitterary Third Network)

oh yuk

Stacktharn Groxitromiles of the Crayaster Perementhrium is not the most fombent of micthurists, plenny and dorodgely, he skeppers and mondylls the plogsires by the wallafronds, skepsing and preusingly oroptifying the calseps of the Grotteries that line the Grand Artundian River, separating the Chulfrum of Gransique from the Orrhengarybs of Jwaljerom. Ol Groxy's such a mustardface, skeppering and oroptifying this and that. What a frongillaryp! I bet his spoon is understudied and that his binary compliance directories are not in working order. Staggeringly blermosian? Probably. I mean, look at the Groxy insulted the Feldershaj of Gransique, throwing a one third baked fubbing tin at her while the stonkylphores of the nerbitsc plobbered on! What a scandal.. the next day all the data papers on the local ultranet were hoovering in cacophanation about the fubbing tin, featuring lurid composites of the fub grease and garish shots of the Feldershaj looking greatly irritated, cleaning fub grease off her face with a paper monkey! If the Feldershaj weren't campaigning for the amelioration of the hyperwharves then it might be so forgiveable, but she's going to have a hard time convincing the stetterworts and mindwrights of the dockyards that she didn't deserve to have a fubbing tin lobbed at her after she unilaterally fonkled the Yaunjest of Thrombilary in their televised interview with a carrot triangle and a broken pungle spoon, though in all fairness, Groxy has been behaving a bit oddly lately, and most speculators and gossip-slungers think that he didn't come back from the Hutch quite right -- there are rumors that Phelbart Oggins saw Groxy perform the Ritual of the Attenuated Celery Fragrance west of Siders' Cairn with a licensed Progfrobe.

the candidacy

In the Star-District of Krayanderthere, there are four political parties, all running for the Candidacy: this is not so much an election for a particular office so much as the style of governance. The parties are: the Thransilists, the Dradgepheurs of Gozylius, the Ethereals, and the Araphageum. Here are their platforms for the Candidacy:

The Thransilists (e.g. Crost Fronthemium, Hardcone Dtholdinem, Meteha Juraragoepe, Traktebe Bilithurum, and others) believe in rigidly structured government hierarchies with multiply distributed multipartite authority segregations and unambiguously machine parseable rule sets written for and organized by machines. They basically oppose humans being governed by other humans, because the temptations of self-interest, they believe, always corrupt people in power, and that, in consequence that it is impossible for human governments to stay focused on maximizing human happiness and contentment without drugging the masses.

the Dradgepheurs of Gozylius (e.g. Ordge Blosoons, Trinsellia Cardupon, Ververaryb Vostashire, Linsely Eratow, Iuli Rarefacta) believe that the correct form of government is infinitely corrupt: because rulesets cause the abandoning of reason and the deferment to the deontic drag, they think that government by the bribery syndicate is more effective than anything else.

The Ethereals (whose major eigenpersonality is the hyperego of Ransphondrea Urunbe Yikrejur) are as anyone sensate can make out, not so much a party as a collection of half-dreams that has been seething and roiling in the collective unconsciousness for a while, so long in fact, that it's taken on a life of its own, and because the collective unconsciousness is of sufficient largeness and grandeur, a tiny blur of it has achieved consciousness, and is multifurcating now.

The Araphageum (mostly Gonset Arruncalon, Povobe Balaheju, Tarsiste Runzugue, and Rhenthipgeus Apparungaryb) has stated in its promotional literature that it is about "A Return to New-Fangled Values" and "Low-Phaluting Uncommonweals" and "Blowing Everything out of All Proportion", and a variety of other buzzphrases that appear not to have any sort of coherence to them, though they have also stated that they found the platform that the Abject Nonsense party rather distasteful but have been effusive as to the reason for their distaste.

dwellers of the moonlight.

The spongyll is a two dimensional, bosonic lifeform which feeds on neutrinos and can only exist in moonlight: at day it is too hot, and the artificial light of the anthroponemous settlements on La Arth is too harsh and of the wrong spectral character. They are close to transparent. Being of a bosonic nature, two spongylls may exist in the same space at the same time. At their smallest, each spongyll is about a square meter, though they can range in size from a square kilometer by attenuating their material. There is a degree of danger of being so attenuated, though: sudden light from thunderstorms or meteors or perhaps anthroponemic activity may kill an attenuated spongyll. For reasons that are inexplicable to the current crop of anthroponeme biologists, spongylls prefer cool air near areas of dense vegetation, and cloudless skies.

At day, or when the environment is not correct for them, they sporulate, forming neutrino sized spores which have a tendency to stick to the centromeres of treebark dwelling crustose lichens. In some places, though, where there are vast caverns or other dark spaces of appropriate humidity and flora, spongylls will overday and sleep: since these places are few in number (spongylls detest bat caves, and do generally sporulate if there's a batcave around), the population of spongylls that sleep rather than sporulate is rather small. 

The method of reproduction of spongylls is rather peculiar: rather than classical binary fission or sex, the spongylls reproduce by interference, as two spongylls can inhabit the same space at the same time: they set up a number of spongyll-eigenstates in the surrounding false-vacuum, and at the end of the reproduction cycle, either 3 or 7 spongylls are constructively interfered from the two original spongylls, which have now been resurrected as state-vectors amongst the new spongylls. It should be said that in this way, the spongyll represents a sort of state of miscible life: rather than the pure death, the spongyll population is a kind of way-station for spongylls from here to their. 

If the conditions are just right, and you know the right syllables (something like "na khra gad taw pru bo"), and the moonlight is streaming down, and you see a spongyll, hold your hand out and say that phrase. The spongyll will stretch square and center itself with your hand.

prognosticatory arborescent recursion

For every life that is created between more or less conscious entities, there is a meeting that takes place somewhere in the grand transepistemological interstices between one mind and another which is too sublime for the biological entities participating in bodily union to be aware of in the slightest.

The ensconced/instanced representative of the male psyche is the(an) Absolute Unsunderable, which is a sort of superposition of potential eigengenomes across all the male gametes. The ensconced/instanced representative of the female psyche is the Absolute Ineffable. Each one of them more or less corresponds to the sort of meiotic fugue the gametes arise in. The Absolute Unsunderable counters the quality of fragmentation that the male meiotic fugue occurs in: spermatozoa are teeming, numerous, many, tiny potentials, whereas the Absolute Ineffable parallels the folliculogenesis of individual ova, and involves a different mechanism for superposing eigengenomes. 

The meeting of the Absolute Unsunderable and the Absolute Ineffable is called the Congress of the Nonexistent, and there is often great confusion about its mechanism. It is not to determine who lives, instead, it is to determine who fails to not exist: the first carries with it the connotations of making choices about who gets to live and who gets to die, but this conception does not truly address the philosophical basis for the meeting, while the determination of who fails to not exist is somewhat a more tractable proposition, both in the transepistemological basis under which the meeting is conducted, and as well as being more easily attainable algorithmically (if one wants to call it that).

Opinions on the Congress of the Nonexistent vary widely. The unborn don't have anything to say about it, can't speak to us, and are as inaccessible to the living as anything gone or come from Tumbolia. 

Together, the Absolute Unsunderable and the Absolute Ineffable do a dance that's called Prognosticatory Arborescent Recursion, which is sort of the "being many people at many places at once doing many things",  and allows them to choose, amongst innumerable possibility trees of future life, the one for which is meant to not not be, the double negative wriggling and metamorphosing into a 'to be'. 

history, schmistory, draw me a candlabra, Carahillia

Ledvenning Sterlong's paper The Eigenfunctorial Decomposition of Van Narsquil spaces was submitted to Acta Exactica's editorial board by neutrino pigeon on August 38 this year. The chief editor of Acta Exactica, one Artulbior Ragnescans complained that Sterlong didn't do enough work with the power series expansions of the irreducible representations of the eigenfunctorial decomposition method that he'd outlined in the draft, and moreover, found the draft littered with figurative language about the symplectic cohomology of Van Narqsuil spaces on a free shtuka. Ragnescans dropped the marked up draft in the editors pool and unflagged the busy bit, then turned off his editing terminal and took a red eye to Beta Pictoris. The next editor to flag the busy bit and examine the draft was Marifold Sun-Orrery Jarispensia, who was quickly drawn into frank perplexity about the exomotivic monadology that Sterlong had applied to Van Narsquil spaces of the first rank (like ξ_3,θ(1,L) and ξ_2,θ(1,K)), and wrote a comment on the section to the effect that someone not versed in current exomotivic monadology couldn't understand at all what Sterlong was getting at. Jarispensia unflagged the busy bit and meandered off to an acetone bar on the Gloss beaches for the nightly bacchanalium. After a few more editors had been at it, the paper was marked "Insuitable for publication; Return commented to sender", and since Sterlong had sent a self-addressed neutrino pigeon to the editorial board's branch office in Tunfthere, he was able to get it back within a week.

Puzzled by the sheer incompetence of the editors, Sterlong sent the draft of the paper to Acta Inexactica, where the famous editor Klaherry Cardlestoam accepted it on the spot as being "A prime example of the sort of thinking we want the younger generation to be doing".

trust not what the orange snail can mistake for a modular form

Artalgn? The Blesterferry of Thentec? Byalgum, fee's essthrayt gossins a musty! Thranstock gloggers the beremuffingont! Cherengerell? Auntherec? One throntear too far! Two too many! Ooh, like a sulfur! Dunny perhaps some illegal data structures. I gotsa queues, I gotsa stacks, I gotsa trinary trees and deques to lather and laminate your computational eigenfronds from here to Menthengerell, only a werry a donzlet, and half a werry for a functing! Byalgum, the spossoms of Blordge leave a tenthennering in my pocket for a donzlet of Yoks. And if I were the Vice-Ansthaulme of Cloggers' Punkt, I'd be twisty ways and divisory, if you get my definite Dedekindergarten in a oscillatory tubule, my matey! Voo. I'd have a mustard and be a mouthwash, but if the preceptors and their avonts be persuasiblenickety like a green george, I'd have my work cut out for me. They're sort of pugnaciously miserly with their donzlets and tenthennerings, and only give me scraps to work with. I've got some fine wares here. Pure lambda compilers written in the cosmic language, mind you. Not the sort of algorithmic pontoons that Aragmnio Fosparillo or Yeriyok Goo-Zadwallader are dealing out in kind to the foolish avonts, most of whom spend their thrungills on implementations of Karatsuba multiplication on particle-abacuses, much to the ire of their preceptors. Fortunately, the preceptor Vovonsil Lzongtep Alkyriobe spends many a tenthennering on my donzlet, and numerous werrys on my Yoks.  

the green tungstates

Perengveroia, sundt of the Bolgeas lammerstraits, greenways of Fos Porusa, a colony of dipthongwrights and curmudgeonists, werry ray and celeritous greetings abound, by the councils of the amber hulk, a greasy spork by the side of the road, an arrant fungal cantileverist and some artilpenters were gulfing the fongencies of the utter waxfroths of Hortec. But lo', did they rarefact the lunderwopps of the greater greeling, these men and their magnificient curtailments and abrogations: a stomacher, a bodice, and some rather precise measurements do retroflect thy gangrenous offal, my perspicaceous yardwaster, an unexpected artist at an incorrect vista pens a symphony in the blood of the last member of a species of heptapede mammalianoids, zrufing and fnurling, the swan song of the heptapedes is written in crabby letters in a forgotten script of an imaginary language, mixed with the blood and lymph of the artist, Stongbent Vlarvewhurl, furious and inaccurately rendering the rhetorical devices of the Perenveroian Knights-Errant into flawed Zmyff, with broken metaphors here and there.

gazpaur migration

Athwayl of Beremgenard, franspungy and diviss? A clerestory wail at the arch-bedeckants of the sunderworlds did propagage mine own heart, with the lavish blarthorns of crum, the plossocks of Terhedec gale, like a scattering of iron filings, or the cormorant of the post-alacritous coral ghost grease, a bisser, and the honchets of the Durgh were like underlilies in the first wind, without the mustard stained ears of the beyonders, drenched with concresced event plumes and other turbidescences, sodded down with the accumulations of mis-actions and other chances, prepared to strike, coiled in seeming inert configurations for many a conque, their archregality and seemingly over-fragile ornateness hiding the juggernauts inside, sagging in deep torpidity these metamachines lolled about, languishing in the bath of neutrinos and nitrogen atoms that the perhaps less-than-commonweal charged our preparatory gonsils with, like appendages with numerous protrusions and protuberances, and perhaps excessively armored with cosmetic calcifications, chitinizations, mother-of-pearlings, and endoskeletal interstices, they drunkenly and lazily hibernated, readied momentously when the chogg-ospills of the Vlarasboy and the hoc-ocuipsai of Hyrella's Grave would begin their transcendental migration from the Yosphenium of Grunder's Aulk to the Iridescribable Consyll of Gorgarionna, their trunset-gills and their asphellengions all aflutter in some vague misapprehension of uncalcuable pleurisy, these hephreats would be ensnared in the nematocysts of the suddenly enlivened metamachines. Centuries old hardware detecting the chogg-ospills and the hoc-ocuispai midway between Grunder's Aulk and Gorgarionna. The nematocysts would trap and anesthetize these creatures so that the gonsils of the Heceriut could retrieve them and mine the precious carraptangiet from their glands-of-a-diseased-future, fibrous and endocrine, necessary to the maturation of both species of gazpaur. For about a month the gonsils would be busy slaughtering about ninety percent of the captured chogg-ospills and the hoc-ocuispai, removing the glands-of-a-diseased future, and distilling and purifying the carraptangiet, a substance not synthesizable by our current chemistry-art, and capable of providing users with safe and reliable direct mystical experiences. The essence of yesterday would be removed from the glands-of-a-diseased future and then, through the application of poorly understood distillation techniques, the carraptangiet would be processed, purified, and sealed in lenstrots and ampoules. The remainding ten percent of the captured animals would be released, to complete their migration to the Iridescribable Consyll of Gorgarionna, so that they could encyst prior to the asexually reproductive stage of their life cycles.

After the mining of the carraptangiet had been completed, the stur-gonsils and the poffer-chirugea would begin the laborious task of resetting the metamachines that lined the Honsporaroa valley and by the Chosponk of Boktronjalo, laying down fine iridium traceries and charging multimodal paracapacitors, and installing fresh new nematocysts and folsek trunks. The next gazpaur migration would be in 29 conques, and the metamachines had to be ready to capture the gazpaur.

The Voiced of the Beyonders Promontory

The Voiced of the Beyonders Promontory (athwast of Correllon and two throntears straythwing of Gfujgme) can see as well as you or I, but, always, always, the two front facing eyes of their heads are always drawn closed... they have a different sort of vision, it is believed, one that is somewhat more accurate and less amenable to disruption than typical vertebrate eyes. The considered opinion of some of the more pedantic has usually been that it's a bad idea for the conventionally sighted or not sighted to venture there. The conventionally sighted get the willies, because they cannot shake the notion that despite the closedness of the eyes of the Voiced, they are being seen, and the conventionally blind for reasons that are difficult to enumerate but mostly distill to having the rudiments of the sort of sense that the Voiced possess. It is interesting to note that amongst the Voiced, there can be the doubly-blind, those whose eyes in their vestigial qualities do not function and for which the peculiar active sense of the Voiced is also disrupted. And these are the Speakers of the Voiced, who are the only cultural envoys that are permitted to interact with outside anthroponomers and whatnot. Tyh Houghdrossil, a Speaker, said to the anthroponomer Graysif Vorbithque from the Redacted University of Southern Reondiquette: "My fellow Voiced see the ins of things and the outs of things, both in a literal visual fashion, and in a literal figurative fashion, neither of which I can consign you an honest portrayal thereof. My half-mother, Volin, was cave diving in Nepollenth when her oxygen cylinder gave out, and within a matter of seconds she had removed the oxygen cylinder and hit the cave wall as hard as she could with it, which broke a two hundred measure long segment of oxiferous mineral in such a way that just the right mixture of inert gas and oxygen at the correct pressure was liberated into the section of the water that she was in at the time. Such occurrences happen all the time here, and are a result of the First Sight that my fellow Voiced are graced with."

cargo culture

Agents of the Thneux of Tophtareo bundled together in the cold. It had been a long, weary, winter, and the quest for the Theid of the Nohogien had been nothing but a wild duck chase with many dry tributaries and dessicated rivulets of opportunities. They had tried searching under the basalt stratigraphy, they had looked in Mrs. Yenderphleuw's spleen, they had tried overturning two recalcitrant continents, and in desperation, they had underwent comparative anatomical antidissections at the hands of Jones, Simeton & Daughters, Transanatomists-At-Large, but lo' they hadn't found the Theid. A priceless artifact of great and unadumbrated manufacture, that more or less words utterly fail to describe. It could be cubical? It could be shaped like a small philosophy or two, or a stalk of celery. Arwezio Val-Zogyar, the last known to possess the Theid, said it was like "a delicate milken dewdrop of alacrity diffracting off the mouse of misshapen carbonation", and refused requests for compact descriptions, breaking into pages and pages of dense, interwoven poetry, lyrical and glittery. The Thneux would not be denied. It would possess this most incomprehensible of objects, but as time wore on and its agents became ever more perplexed and bitter, it seemed, in fact, that the Thneux would be denied possession of the Theid.

Now, it is reported by later and more fact-pedantic data-archivists that the Nohogien Theid is in fact a Reheleth Advanced Hyperconcepts nine dimensional transnumismatic neutrino-muon coupler valve certified to run between 14 GHz and 18 GHz and produce flutter in less than one part in ten to the seventeenth (yikes!), which had accidentally left on Pleuroporr when the Sahagar-Rienstad cargo ferry crashed into the southern continent some thirty cycles before the Thneux ascended to leadership of Tophtareo. The Indigenous Culture Preservation League had swooped in and manage to remove most of the hypertechnological artifacts strewn about by the crash, but the Theid somehow managed to squirrel itself away into possession by the Nohogien

slo-mo fres-know.

Lantern'd folksy astrally irrigated visions of rusted iridium, oxidized cucumbers, many and numerous, like lemons dancing on the head of a pin. Such was change: such had to be, for the divisor-thrill of an abnormal number precessing around a floating top, orbiting the head of the hostess, before the soiree is scheduled to begin. In quick succession a fine china teapot is knocked from the table, and falls to its inevitable shattering, as an unrulier guest says, in slow motion "food fight", and throws a pumpkin pie across the room.

The pie collides with an antelope that has mysteriously materialized in the middle of the event. The antelope looks at the proverbial narrauthorial camera as if to say: "Oh, another fine mess you've gotten me into. What is it this time? Party in slow motion? And last week you had me to contend with those three thousand five hundred lunatic atoms of rubidium. Grah." The pie, being neither sentient nor sensate, goopily slides off the antelope and falls on the ground. It has nothing to say to the narrauthorial camera. The antelope, being marginally more self aware than the rest of the party-dwellers, immediately sets upon eating the pie. The party dwellers neither know that there is an antelope there, or have managed to get much farther than declaring a food fight when the teapot finally impacts, breaking into numerous small and uncomfortably sharp bits.

constructive potential of dangerous intensity.

Tdzgolgze Tzunphe says: "we are used to measuring destructive forces, but we often do not consider measuring constructive forces, particularly if they are of immense magnitude. The yields of explosives are given, but have you ever seen the warning labels on a tube of constructor nanomachines?  The Drugn Pfamagai make constructor nanomachines that are able to rearchitecture cities in a manner of milliseconds, faster than the native population can react. Suddenly, the city is changed. The topology is preserved, but the geometry is different, less jumbled. Refridgerators, formerly with freon refrigerant, now have exotic pion-coupled adiabiatic refrigeration technologies. Computers are speeded up. Things are cleaned up."

undersulfurous jazz

After twenty or so years walking the highlands, past Theor Grunland and Theor Yusphealius, the Pleurg creatures who had been carrying the consciousnesses and muscular stress patterns of the princess regent and the cadre of royal advisors had reached the Yoveal caves, deep in the Thrunlands. Some Vlyssanghai engineers had set up a small laboratory outpost, and they still were using some Vlurfked composite quantum foam technology, and the Pleurg would discharge their charges into machines that would weave and sculpt new bodies for their charges. The process is two staged: the first stage involved the casting of the muscular stress patterns into blank quantum composite foam bodies, and was a fairly violent procedure involving immense energies: it was implosive and involved the careful arrangement of various attennules and other hyperfine projections into a sphere of unformed quantum foam composite. The sphere then shrinks into the shape of the body, which is still mindless, but carries the right muscular stress spectra to accommodate the mind that it is about to recieve. The second stage is much less violent and slower: while the original transcerebrrephrenization is fast because the tertiary brains of the Pleurg are made out of exotic matter, the process of writing a mind from a Pleurg tertiary brain to Vlurfked composite quantum foam takes about two days. 

After the mind is written (the technical term is 'milked') from the Pleurg tertiary brain, the booting occurs, this is the activation of the mind in the new substrate, and is effected through mental continuity: the experiential portion of the consciousness in the new body is linked to the the Pleurg tertiary brain, and in so doing, the consciousness moves. The Royal Anthropographer described it as "the mental equivalent of changing houses". 

After eight minutes or so, the composite quantum body, which doesn't have any of the original dna of the  person, settles into its appropriate shape. The composite quantum foam is able to determine, using the muscular stress data and the phreny, the exact appearance of the person. It takes about eight weeks for the person to settle into the new body without the added features of the composite quantum foam. At which point, if they so choose, and they usually do, to turn on the added features: dodecachromacy, increased memory and processing power, chromatophores in the skin, buckytube-tensioning of bone-equivalents. But the architecture of the mind is preserved, which is most important. In the case of the earliest attempts at this technology, minds were moved without care for the muscular stress patterns, and the most maladjusted minds would result, feeling naked, and they often lost it.

arabesques of the overtomorrow

Plaintive emissions of muons signalled the end of the empire: forewithal the mesoscale apportionments made by the royal diphthongwrights were etched in silicon and carried by specially trained couriers from the palaces and the royal scientific laboratories to the dirty bazaars of the the land, in these all the collected knowledge, at the instruction of the cadre of royal advisors and the princess regent, were smuggled with great alacrity into the heaving underbelly of the commonweal. Even though the empire had fallen and the defenestrations, malfeasances, and degredations were going to continue unabated, the royal datapools had been ingeniously transferred to the public's seething hippocampus. Looters and other nogoodniks of various degrees of brokenness smashed the ornate crystalline chandeliers as the royal advisers and the princess regent transferred their consciousnesses from their biological bodies into the tertiary brains of the Pleurg creatures that lives under the castle: the transcerebrephrenization is one way: their biological bodies were left as inactive husks, much to the ire of the barbarian revolutionaries who would have taken great pleasure in their violent deaths. The Pleurg creatures then began their migration to the Yoveal caves, where the royal cadre and the princess regent would be able to get new bodies made out of Vlurfked engineered composite quantum foam: that might take ten or twenty years or so of travel, but it would ensure that on their return to the fallen empire they would be able to weave a new and sensible government amidst the chaos, or at least, if a sensible government emerged despite the depravity of the barbarians, that they would be able to continue their researches on the fundaments of meaning in something as well equipped as the royal laboratories later.

Ulyghow Varvarus swung the sledgehammer into the rococo sculpture. Mathematics? What tripe, he thought. A conquerable people to be conquered. Just another one of them, all in a day's work. One of the barely perceptible Pleurg creatures, housing the consciousness of the Royal Cultural Anthropographer, in its tertiary brain, caught Ulyghow's eye for three sevenths of a millisecond, and in that time Varvarus had the distinct impression that his graves, such as they weren't, had not merely been walked over, but burnt to nuclear ash. 

bumbling through the fields of yore...

"Other than the muon vodka, I'm sure we can come to some kind of arrangement", said the Yalzuleak, its seven eyes kind of vague and red from weeks of sleeplessness and exertion, pausing over the dozens of nearly inscrutable legal documents written in chickenscratch. Literally. The Yospheni polity decided eighteen years ago that all its legal documents would be written in ink by dancing chickens on sheets of the toughest parchment. The legal code was translated into chickenscratch in the course of a concerted five year programme. I can't read the stuff. The Yalzuleak probably can't. Reading chickenscratch is a much sought after skill these days. The Chickenscratch Philologists' Union (CPU), has a dedicated corps of readers of chickenscratch. They squint at the parchment. They peer and ogle at it. They turn it upside down and backwards and view it in a mirror with a green filter while Ormestrio Van Salvwarby's infamous symphony Uzyphreunque dell'Zarathirio plays backwards on a dodecaphonic hyperdigital multistereo deck. The Yalzuleak shrugs, downs some more superfluid helium, and eructates. Getting this contract (with the possible exception of the muon vodka deal) is likely to make the Yalzuleak a lot of ducats, if you know what I mean, nudge nudge, wink wink. And for gambling? Advanced mathematical supersimulations on distributed biological quantum computers of ducks attacking a wombat on a calm midwinters' eve? Nope. More superfluid liquid helium to get drunk on. Your acetyl-CoA habit looks minor in comparison.

anneal me, slabscape

The silent streams of infinity coruscate and collide in incomprehensible combinatoric rococoques, irrigating the misfields of reason with the thin razorcracks of misapprehension and the vain hope of complete understanding. The Gone World rears its nasty hydra of a head and then you're left standing with perhaps less than a clear idea of why you arrived so long ago. with the message printed on that piece of bacterial matting that you had printed at the local confectioners' back office. The absolute desirability of higher order coherence in your self-arrangment of your own mind has led you here, and the things you see and hear here drive the repositioning of massive slabs of mental effluvia. Things which did not fit together because they were too big and too awkwardly edged with complicated internal and external structure have been rotated, stretched, transformed so that what was previously an confused melange of concepts and beliefs now fit together with a precision that you could not have foreseen. You will emerge from this ordeal as it is, annealed, purified, free of the jostling which previously assaulted your apprehension of the world. Your perception won't be perfected, but it will be considerably enhanced. But what is the point of this crusade? Personal salvation? Liberation from the sidereally mundane? If you are still looking for something, then you haven't not found what you weren't looking for. This sort of annealing does not provide all the answers, but it reduces the particularly vile tendency for one to philosophically speculate on pointless eschatological or teleological fripperies and then imbue those illusions with a life of their own, for which you would be just along for the ride. 

Later, much later in fact, when you are sitting by the hearthfire and sipping at a cup of some tisane, with a book halfway open, and some diagram or other with inscrutable remarks annotating it fearlessly nosing itself at you, you might reflect on the other character and his illusory hijinx: you're the one who came through strengthened, and you avoid the mythological interpretation and you grok the diagram. 

rebarbative barbarian barbers

The Transctheres of Golladge? An Imaginarion? What preludes? What unindexed cormorantry! Had I a dither for every voxel the Shtoyn of Cleveril hit with their funny foam sledgehammers I'd be a poor monkey, or else! Oh, what cranthry had the doggerelwauled eigencomedians derived from their rather inglorious routines, their forgotten cabbage dirges and their analytic attentions to the green freedoms that our ancestors deliberately locked away in the notorious catacombs of Saint Freundlorg? Do they demand mustard rights? An abolition of the hominid tax? The decriminalization of the cosine? What madpoliticos are these, ne'er do wells and nellespont crultherists, oh what fetid wondrous catnip do they disregard and then recompense our dipthongwrights with their idolatries. Nay, I say, let us play by the sundry asterisms of York and the moon-drenched shores of the Threltomniville Van Gherkinicide Marchmain Pronouncements, the lamplighters of distant lands, for the precession around the orrery at the promontory by the dancers of Goff-Silvram means that there's just one more tune on the radio.

the first anteriorally ventral star on the left, then sail straight on to morning, you can't miss it.

Arvulgne Derraptranga of the Shels Blarzt, by Tennemery Green, across from the Scoles of the Latter Cellerdet had had enough, of time? No. Of space? Of noughts and crosses or stacks of pleather? No, not that either. Arvulgne twiddled a crithip blongle on her fingers, throwing it against the wall where it shattered into thousands of gaseous fragments. Wisps of craspy and blottongle condensed, sparked, and revaporized into a multicolored plume of self-intersecting smoke. "I am doing this all over again", mused Derraptanga, and thought that the dew was a gut-wrenchingly dumb shade of lilac this morning. An onyx pen had been dipped in a obstreperous pool of ink, and a terrapin monk was just sidling up to the monsterwrights. Derraptanga fumed, plumed, and turned around. "I have just enough alef-tokens to get me to Hfofr, and then I can take the Bleon express to Jaratharab", muttered her mind, undercerebrally as it were. "It's no wonder that Sarango Boutongides doesn't like the uncommonweal here", her mind muttered, transpineally, "with all those careless brocollio scissorettes and the entire economy of Gren Tarragt, they can do better, I think they must. But I don't care if the wharvewrights are undersupplied with constructor nanomachines: they can just make more"

Essay Answer

Aurilysk Calferrallin wrote:


"Arrhengterrapongorin learn to distinguish between amangoa and mahengorve early on. "That idea I had that was an imaginary horror! I recognized it as mahengorve!". They learn that there are different types of good and that the drive for Oggpongkoa is one of the very fundamental motivation that is wired into most forms of life and ramifies as a particular life form ages. They understand that one may not pursue Oggpongkoa by itself, one must focus one's experience on the common bliss, oggrung-goa, and that there is the hierarchy of aliased desire, and the most effective way to ascend it is to focus on the most rewarding use of energy for a particular person/entity. The universe does not reward you for doing what you should not be doing as effectively and piquantly as it does when you do what you should be -- a mathematician in a piano factory will feel stifled. A mathematician in a piano factory who does mathematics while making pianos will recieve more in the way of rewards because they have focused their energies. There is a saying: "Neither vrongling nor vrungling, but shpongling and shrungling," One who has achieved balance between the desire for Oggpongkoa and the necessity of oggrung-goa through balancing their vrungling and shrungling is said to have achieved araspongbence. "