*Terms and Conditions Apply* The coffee queue breathes like a pit of content, laptops open like oysters at prayer— and every mouth glows faintly, scrolling its soliloquy. Even the fluorescents blink with boredom. A tired algorithm hums beneath the air vents, counting me. We were promised a seamless morning but the biometric door forgot my…
Black Magic and Other Fables of the Subnatural
### Black Magic A few sour old men in the seventeenth century claimed that what they called ‘oxygen’ deserved that name because it could corrode things (the wish is father to the thought), but this substance is so potent that even this eternally wrong word gained a whole new, invisible freight and now sounds like…
Can You Become Addicted to Translating Poetry?
This article is based on this Dutch article of Martinus Benders Can You Get Addicted to Translating Poetry? I think you can. At least, whenever I’m translating prose, I find myself longing for poetry again—more difficult, and therefore more fun. The Heroic Dose Young, I mainlined the heroic dose: science fiction, quantum shrapnel, occult psalms,…
Magma and Other Testimonies from the Edge
### Magma In Saturnine baths, directly above the Vulsini Volcano, my skin drinks sulfur while in the distance Santa Maria of the Black Salt sings at the edges of Lake Bolsena. Water escapes my hands. A black-magic virus mothers its tale: burning water, saints of salt, swimming in a huffing volcano between Bisenta and Martana—…
Sermon of the Algorithm
**Algorithmic Sermon** The elevator spoke in pings like a tired priest rebuking sins of floor five, where the desks bloom like antiseptic anemones and coffee brews in the glass womb of routine. We wear lanyards like leashes, names swinging low by our hearts, plastic saints of corporate confession. In the restroom mirror, I watch my…
Signed-Out Skeletons
**Logged Out Bones** Some mornings arrive behind a transparent paywall— not grief, exactly, but a subscription to delayed emotion. I log in to myself and forget the password. Again. A toner-scented hush fills the hallway. HR speaks in riddles: Did you complete the module on Compassion Fatigue? I click ‘maybe’ and hear a kettle dying…
The Blackbox Debacle
This article is based on this dutch article of Martinus Benders The Blackbox Debacle Meanwhile, Omtzigt is throwing in the towel — the same man who co-authored the benefits scandal by demanding ruthless fraud enforcement from the tax authorities. Meanwhile, a strange ‘board’ suddenly blew up blackbx, and they did so with one of the…
The Forgotten Mushroom Gods: A Journey Through Myth, Power, and Psychedelic Lore
### Amanita 13 ### The Mushroom Gods and Their Forgotten Legacy Beyond the West, where stories sleep, The mushroom gods their secrets keep. In jungled lands and desert flame, In tongues where old mythology came— Among the Maya, Aztec breath, And songs the Mongol steppes bequeath— The sacred spores have laid their claim In every…
The Luminous Guardians of Emergency Rows
The Fluorescent Saints of Exit Rows Every Tuesday, I wait beneath the humming vent where the radiators speak in morse of neglected decisions. There’s a printer bleeding receipts in the breakroom, and someone—Donna or Steve— wants another click-through, another metric to crisp our days to digital jerky. I misplaced my name once at a kiosk,…
*Conditions and Terms May Apply*
*Terms and Conditions Apply* The streetlight croons in Helvetica, its glow a pop-up ad between dusk & other algorithms— steady as your mother’s voicemail, archived in a distant cloud where dogs, I assume, still dream digitally of grass. At the Tasteful Clone Emporium, they’ve replaced the remorse section with something infinitely scrollable. I tap out…