Dortmund bonus #2

Pretty sure the soap knows what it’s talking about.

Dortmund bonus #1: non-euclidean pavement

TU Dortmund Psychogeography

My friend Feloris and I were stranded on TU Dortmund’s campus over the weekend. Everything was deserted, except for the wild rabbits that have tunneled under, well, everything, we think. Originally we set out to find a place that would sell us some coffee, but soon the dystopian atmosphere called for some psychogeographical documentation. These pictures are the result of our walk – and the inspiration for a collaborative Weird short story in progress. Please excuse the cellphone cam (my good camera is broken), but I honestly think that the cheaper lens rendered the clouds even more foreboding, etc.
(Warning: LOTS and LOTS of pictures.)

Autoform: Forming Reality

Going Up…

…and Down.

Uniformity.

Ominous Containers.

(72) Autoform.

(18) Autoform.

Achtung!

Solar Panels.

(Did I say foreboding clouds?)

(I did, didn’t I.)

Weird Echo. (Urban Ammonite.)

(& from another angle)

Goethe reveals sinister secrets (and not even between the lines).

(Utopia doesn’t age well.)

Imprisoned.

Moreau.

Ritual Site.

Night Time.

Journey into the Infraordinary

My friendly neighbourhood paper wasps have been evicted.

Spaceship Names and Invasive Code

My addiction to list-making is flaring up again. (Which might or might not mean I’ll soon be writing more short stories.) Lately, I’ve come to realize that good band names often make good names for spaceships as well (e.g. Nada Surf, the Mars Volta). Since they tend to be multilingual compounds, and also (more often than not) quite interesting references, I blame M. John Harrison’s Empty Space trilogy. Besides, his “invasive code” is so well written that last night I dreamt that a white paste the consistency of baby food was coming out of my mouth, and a childless acquaintance suddenly had a daughter… It was pretty uncanny. That said, one of my favourite passages from Empty Space is “Renoko self-identified as human”. (More rights for entities traditionally identified as non-human! Down with anthropocentrism!)

Subtle Invasion, pt. 2

Recent observations suggest we’d better keep an eye on our local graffiti artists…

Insomnia: The Sequel.

Insomnia I: Lunatic.

Insomnia II: Ghost Story.

Never despair. Our heroes are everywhere.

Shoggoth.