Satrap of Saturn

 DID YOU HEAR, O GROGNARDS? DID YOU HEAR?! M.A.R. Barker turned out to be a secret creep and scholarly vanguard wielding pen and typewriter under the Black Sun! That means he used his PhD and skills to deny the Shoah and who knows what else, he was a NAZI, and the Tekumel Foundation has kept mum for a decade, because HOLY HORST-WESSEL-LIED, what are we going to tell our literally hundreds of fans?  So uh, I found Tekumel disgusting and impossible to believe in as a setting YEARS before it was cool. Here's why, how, and harrumph: The setting has many, many jewels and wonders. It is a treasury of weird detail and gameable, plottable ideas and structures. I love Barker's aliens, well, some of 'em: the Shen, Ssu, Hlyss, Hlaka, Hlutrgu; and the semi-intelligent reptiloid Sro, Serudla, Feshenga, and numerous smaller many-legged beasties. Purple poison plants? Beautiful. I could go on, but I have a science fantasy setting of my own, SORQ, where i have subjected the beings and trop...

this sand is as old as the cosmos; well, the particles in its atomic nuclei are. ibn arabi says all entities are æternal: their existence is encompassed in god's knowledge, a quiddity extrinsic to time. muslim eschatologies come in nested orders of infinity; all is dying except the face of your lord. i put some stuff i won't rewrite or chop and change to fit in another tweet. i think a lot about four dimensional 'objects', the world tracks of entities moving along through this cosmos, each entity a composite of atoms moving into and out of its field; as far as we know, a finite number of atoms came into existence at the big bang, bashed into bigger and more pretentious atoms inside stars and during their death tantrums. subatomic particles pop in and out of existence in the quantum foam, but they don't get above themselves and turn into hydrogen atoms. or cats, like the stray i buried yesterday. i saw him on a bleak, busy little road along the train tracks, and went...