A short poem of a man in search for his date of death — On a rocky shore a small ship lands and sinks beneath the waves And from the wreck a man emerges by his fortune saved And he bows his head 'fore an army of white birds with beaks of blood As tall as men and talking of the thunderbird above ‘I…

How a dark lord demonstrates the first and foremost rule of art — Sauron may be the biggest and baddest villain in Middle Earth during the events of The Lord of the Rings, but as any self-respecting nerd knows, Sauron was once only lieutenant to the greatest evil in Tolkien’s legendarium; Morgoth; most powerful of any immortal angel; the sole source of all…

A midwestern daydream turns western adventure — Chapter I Yvain jerked awake and wiped the sweat from his face. He was in his bed, in his room, sunlight trickling in through the window, just like any other normal morning. And yet, his head whirled with every thought possible and a few more for good measure. He was going on…

A search for a site known only from local legend — Summer 2021. Black Hills, South Dakota. I got out of work at 4 PM, five days a week. For a whole week straight after work — the first week of August, the hottest of the summer — I set out on the same one adventure. I’d change clothes in the…

We’ve come a long way to reach James Webb — What the various scientific revolutions of the past couple hundred years have done for our knowledge of the cosmos needs no introduction. From daguerreotypes to wet and dry plate photography to spectograms to great refractors to astrographs to the Hubble and James Webb telescopes, our ability to observe and capture…

Interdependence, systems collapse, and the perfect storm on the horizon — 3200 years ago, the world ended. Now, many are saying it just might end again. How, then, did it happen the first time, and how might we learn from past mistakes today? The late Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamian regions operated with an eerily similar economic system…

The exponential rate of social change and the inevitability of a social reset — You know, while getting inundated with scores of “little miss” memes on Instagram, I realized something; it’s been several months since I’ve seen a truly viral meme trend. Really. I remember even a couple of years ago, everyone (at least in my age group) seemed to know every viral meme…

a couple quick lyrics on encroaching apocalypse — funeral home as empty as the life all these formalities inspired what a waste of one so many others had for centuries admired maybe it’s alright if we fail if just a few of us try weekends in July I rot at home alone and let a rich man get…

And why radicalism will only die when modernity does — It’s no secret that fanaticism, radicalism and utopianism are on the rise. Politicians who wouldn’t have had a half a chance in hell to hold office just a few elections cycles ago have, as we all know, seized the highest offices or come unbelievably close since 2016 or so. I…