Ali Baba's a different species

I got your dogmatic, intolerant, proselytizing, anti-assimilationist Islam right here:



But, you know. Those mysterious Wahabis Shiites Sunnis Sufis. So strange. So hostile to modern culture. So very Not Like Us.

A River Too Weary to Flood

Good heavens, is that the time?

...I knew I was forgetting something somewhere.

Right. Back on the wagon, hopefully.

While you're waiting, have some JBE:

In Poses Keen from Bygone Days

The blogosphere is awash in art of late, it would seem:

First, those of you who are fans of my late grandfather's work should check out this stuff that Tony found in one of the many recent attic excavations. Some of it's the abstract expressionism that he was known best for, but there's lots of atypical pieces there too. (I, of course, like the one that looks like a Great Old One, but YM, naturally, MV.)

Second, Spyder got tapped again to do some artwork for the award-winning RPG Burning Wheel, and is showcasing her fine illos for the upcoming magic-focused book here. (In case you didn't know, she previously did some interiors and the back cover painting for the acclaimed Monster Burner volume, which is a level of coolness I could barely have contemplated so few degrees of separation from when thumbing through the Fiend Folio in my fevered youth.) A great big hurrah to her for this new gig and another tally mark on her Srs Profeshunul Artist board. (Also: Mmmm. Wizards.)

Third, Elly (who is a colleague from my late place of employment and otherwise fellow-traveler, for those of you who have been wondering whence she came to the blogroll) has embarked on the ambitious project of a series of works inspired in part by Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, and chronicling the progress (of that, and other stuff too). Aeroplane is a work that's at the very least on my shortlist of Desert Island Albums: compelling, labyrinthine, bizarre, unsettling, and chockablock with strange earworms, which is why I sometimes find myself singing "When you were young you were the king of carrot flowerrrrrs" while I'm doing the dishes or some damn thing. (I recall reading that NMH's aesthetic was once summed up as "like Syd Barrett, but with more sex," and that's about right.) It's exactly the kind of effort I applaud, in part because it's the kind of thing I wish I'd thought of first, though my version would no doubt have more of a Mark Ryden sort of vibe going; I look forward to seeing what she does with it.

So that's at least a couple of you out there who have some catching up to do with the mini-zeitgeist, if you've been neglecting pen and palette of late. Show us yer canvases, baby! Whoohoo! (And this would have been an excellent place to note the official launch of Trixie Magpie, except the site's not up yet, nudge nudge, so you're just going to have to Watch This Space.)

"Older than Memphis and Mankind"

The HPL Historical Society's holiday albums, collected together as An Unbearably Scary Solstice, look delightful, but the playlist seems to have one glaring omission, which I have endeavored to correct here. (To be fair, I'm sure it's not the first time such a thing has been attempted, but thus I contribute to the living folk tradition.)

Ahem -

On the 13th day of Mythos, Cthulhu gave to me:
13 polyps whistling
12 mi-go buzzing
11 daemons flauting
10 ghouls a-meeping
9 cultists chanting
8 nightgaunts tickling
7 byakhees flapping
6 deep ones baying
5 FORMLESS THINGS!
4 crawling worms
3 rat hordes
2 Great Old Ones
And a volume of necromancy.

Make the world a little better, and teach it to a child today.

The Moth in God's Eye

Here's something happy for all you wyrdfolk fans: a short and very sweet interview with Timothy Renner of Stone Breath and Crow Tongue, wherein he talks about music and family and the uneasy balance of work and life. It's awfully nice to discover that some of the folks I admire, who make the creation seem so effortless, talk about struggling with their art, especially since "like blood from stone" is a pretty accurate description of what the music's been like for me lately.

On that note, I've begun the outlining process for the rewrite of The Vasty Deep, my 2003 NaNo project whose abortive first draft had some good bits in it but was, I think, fatally broken in ways I can't bring myself to fuss with. I'm hoping this time around the cool shit will be cooler, the pulp will be pulpier, and the dumb parts will be less egregiously dumb. Plus this version will be in first person present, which makes the wordings of the story more better with the reading. Not much to show for it yet, but it's a start, a start.