Castles in the Air is a bi-weekly horror anthology series in the vein of The Twilight Zone.
An astronaut awakens, frozen in place. He quickly realizes that he has regained consciousness and exited cryosleep ahead of schedule, making him unable to move. He desperately fights to keep control of his withering mind, and figure out if there is a way out of this nightmare.
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As this is the first episode of the podcast, all ratings, subscriptions on iTunes and shares are greatly appreciated.
Written, directed and edited by Will Donelson. This episode features voicework by Zack Furniss.
Music used:
"Bedroom Window" by @sloth-hooks
"He is Like this Wall (Coda)" by Jeff Morton
Opening theme is "Consumed by Love" by Giles Appleton
Episode art by Sage Parker
In what we would consider a long dead universe, the last quark hangs in existence. Really, it cannot be said to hang or float, or be described with verbs at all.
There is nothing outside the quark. There is nothing beyond it. When we imagine this, we may imagine an expanse. A white void that stretches into infinity. This is incorrect. Outside the quark, there is nothing. There is no void, no expanse. The lack of existence is not something the quark inhabits; it is a force pressing down on it from all sides. The quark, in this sense, is all existence. The Quark is now everything.
This is what he would imagine, if he could. Never shutting his eyes, he watches Seychelles disappear beneath the bow as the ocean gently lifts and releases the ship. “It’s a small thing”, he thinks without knowing exactly what the thought refers to. To Seychelles, his ship was indeed small. To his home country of Somalia, however, Seychelles was perhaps even smaller. He continued on like this in his head as he watched the crown of the archipelago blink in and out of existence over the waves. To France, Somalia must seem small. He wasn’t sure, he assumed it must be so.
When someone does wrong, scale can be very comforting. He avoids eye contact with his fellows, and instead finally turns his gaze to the other ship. So much larger, so many more people. He takes comfort knowing that, to the sea, they are both small. I his mind, he moves up. Up to where the two boats are dwarfed by the ribbon of islands, up still to nothing but the ocean, up still until he can no longer picture the map. If he could have imagined that quark, he would have felt very comforted. To what hadron was it once attached, he might wonder. What he does consider is that there will eventually be something that will be the last thing to exist.
It could only take him so far, though. There is a hungry pain and a looming fear that disturbs the serenity of scale.
It is a mistake to think Nihilism comes easy. It would have been a great comfort for him to picture that quark at this moment, and felt the embrace of insignificance. To imagine his own cells, on the microscopic level, and travel back a quarter of a million years with them. To imagine the light from the very same moon hitting Mitochondrial Eve‘s eyes for the first same. To picture the Old Mother when she herself was new, before her genes branched off into a million directions, one artery of which lead him here, to this ship, on this night, holding this gun. How would any of this unease matter to him then?
You can be hungry, but you can’t steal. You can steal, but you can’t hurt anyone. You can hurt people, but you can’t kill them. How far back from that print do you have to stand before you can’t read it anymore? What could be done that Eve or the Quark would ever know?
He knows what it is that he has to do whilst feeling what he is told he has to feel. “It would be a blessing”, he might think, “to be small and to know it.”
Instead, he imagines the ship, sliding across a granite sea. He moves back until it disappears into the glint of the moon on the waves, and then further back until the light itself is gone. He could do anything.
HELLO fellow parents. Over the last three (3) months I have been analysing my teens Texting and Sexting texts and have discovered a veritable SWATHE of new sex text code that I will share with you NOW. Simply scroll down to see the codes. Warning: some of these are quite unpalatable.
🏃🏻 - I ran into an old friend who I had sex with
💀 🍆 💀 - I am infertile, let us engage in risk-free intercourse
g2g - Good to go (for sex)
Can’t talk, SAD! - Can’t talk, Sucking A Dick!
✂️ 🍆 - My recent adult circumcision has left me prepared and eager for sex
Code Blart - My parents are watching Paul Blart Mall Cop, come over for quiet sex as their riotous laughter will conceal our sinful animalistic grunting
BCARWPBKFHRITPHS💀LUMUACHLACAMHPTS - Beloved character actor Ray Wise, perhaps best know for his role in Twin Peaks, has sadly passed away. Let us meet up and celebrate his life and career, and mourn his passing through sex
✈️🌫👎 🍆✖️ - Chemtrails have damaged my libido and left me unprepared for sex today
POPS - Prime ovulation, peak sex
3.14159 - The ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter
👉👌📹👀 - Let’s have sex in the blind spot of my parent’s security camera rig
lol - come on guys, surely we all know this one (face palm)
AM - I have no mouth and I must cum
🏅- come look at my Sex Medals
💀 💀 💀 🍆 - My family has died, come over for sex (note: number of skulls equal to number of dead family members your teen has)
Emoji - Term for small images used to depict sex acts
🍑 🍑 - Put a peach in my butt
cu46 - Have yet to crack this one. Any other parents out there able to illuminate this?
Tried my hand at a Gaster battle. I haven’t seen much art embracing his whole shtick of being a lost/deleted/corrupted file. I think something like this is more in line with what Toby would give us in terms of an actual encounter with him.
0.0001 multiplied by the speed of light squared is 9 trillion.
Or, 100mg worth of matter and antimatter multiplied by 3x10^8 squared gives you 9000000000000 joules of energy. Specifically, this is referred to as Annihilation energy.
0.0001 kg would provide the equivalent of 14.28 % of the energy in the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
The average weight of two human bodies is 124kg.
He could never shake the calamity of time from his face, nor the persisting ache of life from his demeanor. Without knowing a thing about the man, you would look at him and think "My God... he survived all that?"
Stage notes from "Lilytooth”, a work in progress
It’s here!
In this video, I discuss The Tempest and it’s storied, weird history, whilst takin a close look at Julie Taymor’s 2010 adaptation of the play. In the video, I talk about the problem with adapting Shakespeare in general, and how film is by definition a transformative medium.
If you enjoy the video, please do like/share/subscribe! I know thats corny, but it really helps this early on.
Let me know what you all think!
Here’s a video about Arrested Development! And editing! And the magic of both!
Raising her head skyward in frustration, her eyes glide over a choppy, crystalline sea. The only sky the Forager has ever known, as if the air itself ruptures into a tumultuous gray just above the mountains. With her limited understanding of the world, she used to assume the atmosphere a physical thing, that thinned out as it approached the ground. Up there, she figured, the air was like a mighty ocean.
Sighing, she digs her hands back into the muck below. A thick, shapeless assembly of dirt and clay – all that remains of whatever structure once stood here. However old this building was, and whatever import it held, to her it was merely something to be dredged. An unspecific mass incarnadine, to be hopefully panned for gold.
The cracks along the ground were filled with this rubbish; great splinters through the earth at the bottom of unimaginable gorges, into which all the works of civilization came tumbling down into. A single split like this had the potential to contain centuries of progress – countless artifacts and trinkets, buried within the rubble. Their individuality now faded, together they lie as a great amalgamation, and a monument to inevitability. If she were to grab hold of something – some old keepsake or remain – it may well be all the we would ever see of a certain snapshot in time. To the Forager, it meant an exchange and a meal.
Indeed, it is hard to say how many priceless heirlooms and invaluable relics she had herself broken in search of a more easily quantifiable trade.
One false step and she herself could be swallowed by antiquity.
To say the history of the objects she held in her hands had ever crossed her mind would be a half-truth – a lie to flatter the ghosts of whatever world she trudged through. Only the immediate past of a given object – how pristine it appeared – ever factored into her thought process. After all, “worth”, and especially human worth, is an invention. Despite lofty connotations, the scrap she neatly folded and tucked away now carried with it a newer, more objective value than what previous generations might deem it to have.
With an ache of pain, the forager arcs her neck skyward. Long before her time, vainglorious scholars waxed poetic about the idea of the convergence. In the now, the reality, the word had lost it's meaning. She had never known her celestial body as a singular identity – only as a part of the twisted amalgamation. Everything had been drawn inwards, you see. As the universe drew ever closer to its inevitable conclusion, it's satellites and travelers were dragged towards its center. It was like a great homecoming, in a sense. Every atom was called home, to be reunited in their single point of origin. In time, it would all be crushed together – every star and every world. There would be a great unification before the end. Out with creation, and in with destruction. Like no more than a breath, with another perhaps to follow.
But for now, and for another trillion years, this will be the shape of things. A tumorous mass, growing larger by the century, and then shrinking into nothingness.
And all sentience throughout all time would amount to - this final stage of evolution – is rats on a ship. Hungry and cold, rummaging through the trash of their forbears.
With her head held high, the foragers eyes glaze over the continent of another planet. Her peers, also raising their heads, might look at her own. It gave her solace, before she got back to work, imagining that she herself was to others a similar, tumultuous sky.
friends, i have been quiet because i have been funnelling all my creative energy into music right now and idk how to move from poems to that on here. I do still make more visually inclined things but right now this is what’s taking over my life. I’m not really calling anything as formal as a hiatus - just that’s why I’m here a bit less right now, though I’ve no doubt I’ll be around again for poems and art.
if you would like to maybe keep up with this music stuff, you can, and I would love it if you did.
twitter.com/breakuphaircut
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I am also working on solo music stuff a fair amount. none of it is being released yet because recording is either difficult or expensive, but old things are on ishanijasmin.bandcamp.com and new things will be too.
There are times in my life I have wondered where the pain goes when it is absent. In my age I've realised that the answer to that question is simply; 'deeper'.
Owen from “Lilytooth”, a work in progress